I used to like hybrids, and obviously series hybrids are the coolest kind of hybrids, but now that I’m driving a budget EV, I honestly don’t see the point anymore. Just get the EV and skip the awkward half-way step that inherits the most expensive and complicated parts from both designs.
Seeing a sleek modern car pull away whisper quiet and then start the ICE 3 seconds later with a stutter and a puff of water vapor from underneath is the most schizophrenic sight, it somehow feels more dated than actual ICE cars.
Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute, an EV will likely work just fine for you.
> bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute
If we put aside 5 hour commute, this describes central Tokyo, not bumfuck nowhere. Bumfuck nowhere has land for offgrid solar and therefore free home charging.
If the city you're in offers free roadside parking with L1 or L2 charging on light poles, good for you, but Tokyo and Japan at large isn't like that at all(unattended roadside parking is banned nationwide and robotic garages are everywhere).
You park your car in a stall, get out of your car, and then the stall closes and it moves a platform under your car and stores it someplace. You punch in your claim number, pay your parking fee, and then it gets your car and puts it back in the stall.
I agree I don’t like having both engines, more to fail. BUT I could see a world where you basically have basically an EV with a smaller battery pack (150 mile range) and basically a swappable $300 generator. I saw swappable so that if anything goes wrong they just swap it for $300, and credit you back async any recovery value. Just electricity generation from it, for rare needs of longer range. I think in theory, it could be a good way to get a cheaper EV supporting rare bursts of range and low maintenance cost.
But I’m not even sure regulators would allow such a design. Even then I’m not sure it’s worth it.
But I am totally done with ICE car maintenance. I want nothing to do with it anymore.
A cheap diesel/gasoline generator might do like 5kW, which is enough for overnight charging but not for range extension or powering the wheels. There were several pretty good range extended EVs (plugin hybrid with larger battery and smaller engine), like the Volt and BMW i3, those had small engines that mainly acted as generators for the battery, but with enough horsepower to at least keep you rolling on the highway. A $300 modular generator ain't quite gonna cut it.
I believe there's also a bunch of Chinese vehicles with similar design, entirely electric drivetrain with gas generators for range extension. Most of these will need to kick in before the battery is empty so that there's some stored energy buffer available for acceleration.
To put it in perspective why a 5kWh generator isn't a range extender: my lightening has a range of 331 miles and 135kWh battery. If we assume a spherical cow (60mph, and I get every single one of those 331 miles), the truck buns through the battery in 5.5 hours, which equates to 24.5kWh to keep up.
In actuality, at highway speeds I'll burn through 80% of the battery in 3 hours which equals a run rate of 36kWh. If we ran a 5kWh generator the whole time and assume perfect charging efficiency, it'd extend the time to charge by 28 minutes.
My Chevrolet Bolt actually shows me the real-time kW draw from the high voltage battery and, while it's highly dependent on driving conditions, it seems to require around 12-15 kW to maintain 60 MPH on a flat dry road using cruise control and with the climate control turned off. It's not the most efficient model on the market, but it's also far from the least; as you noted your F-150 would need significantly more energy under the same conditions.
The lightning is ridiculous, it weight 70% more than your bolt and is huge.
My partner and I honestly bought it to be a whole house backup battery. My regions get ice storms and we have hundreds of gallons of aquariums we'd need to keep powered through a long duration power outage. 135 kwh of battery storage cost more than the 135kwh battery truck, so we got a whole house battery backup system with wheels and cruise control. It can backstop 80 amps for 3 days.
Technically correct for the rating of the generator output capacity, I was just meeting OP where they were at and they used kwh as a unit for the generator. At the end of the day, that nuance isn't all that important
Hmm. Supposing we need a 6 hour drive at 20 kWh per hour (eschewing specific speed/distance figures), and a generous "smaller battery pack" can provide 3 hours (60 kWh). Then the generator must supply the missing 60 kWh during the 6 hour interval, i.e. a 10 kW generator.
Google says those cost from 1k to 5k USD, and they seem rather beefy.
(Just doing the math out of curiosity, otherwise agree with you.)
Yeah... My 7kwh generator is the size of a large wheelbarrow and weighs a good 250 lbs.
Not to mention, loud as all get out at that size.
It also needs a decent amount of maintenance to keep it running (or it needs to run frequently).
Personally... Ev with a swappable battery seems like a much better solution.
The only reason this even sorta makes sense right now is that we're in a really weird transition period where gas is available everywhere and it's still hard to find batteries/chargers.
This isn't a tech problem, it's an infrastructure problem. It should be treated that way.
I’m not sure why you’d offer a drop in option if you can just build it into the car.
Extended-range electric vehicle (EREV) / Range Extender Electric Vehicle (REEV) do exist on the market already.
A more practical solution is to just rent out a small generator on a trailer.
Unless I’ve completely misunderstood what you’re getting at.
It's never that simple, but it could be. Modular standard parts that could be installed on a standard chassis design would be great. So have a small generator or an additional battery, maybe even a fuel cell. Probably never happen but it would be the nirvana of car design. Standardization would drive scale and it could work really well. That approach did wonders for the PC industry.
As always, it's countries in the global south that can't get EVs because they are sold locally for twice the price of an ICE car, even when both are made by the Chinese. So hybrids, price wise are a middle ground because they use smaller batteries which are less expensive
I love the simplicity here.
Another edge case - apartment management company doest allow installing EV - despite legality. Just bureaucracy is mind-boggling in EU. I'd rather have a hybrid that gives me 18-22 km / liter.
We had one neighbour in the area who won after 3 years of fighting bureaucracy - Coming up with a proposal for the board meeting that happens once a year and taking all the feedback points, and working through the insurance companies to amend their standard practices.
What do you spend the additional hour on? Charging for the ENTIRE 2hr trip, starting with an empty car, would take less than 30 minutes in my very average EV. A quick boost good enough for 100km (60mi) at 130 km/h (80mph) takes about 9 minutes. 1 hour of cumulative charging (well spaced) gets me about 750km (466mi) of range. Starting with a charged car gets me well into "fuck it I'm not driving that far in one day" numbers, still on one hour of charging.
One hour of cumulative charging, well spaced, means at least 1.5 hours of actual lost time (exit highway, drive to charger - remember that most US highways do not have service areas as such, so you are interacting with regular local traffic for fuel stops, start/end charging, get back to and on highway) and probably more like two. Same drive with ICE-speed fueling has more like 30 minutes down time (if it’s just me).
If you have children or pets along, you will stop more, but then the question is whether the charging areas have the amenities that fuel stations do - available snacks, restrooms, pet relief areas, and at least the Tesla superchargers I have seen generally do not have the same level of availability for those.
Also, 750 km is well within single-day driving. I did 950 km each way in June, with pets and wife, and it took a touch over 11 hours each way (Google Maps estimates 9.5 hours of actual driving time without stops), and I don’t know any other American who would turn that into a two-day drive unless they couldn’t leave early in the morning. Though I’m sure they exist. There really wasn’t a good place to stop after just doing most of the drive. Either halfway, or all the way, or sleep in some awful hotel and eat up the better part of two extra days of your time off. (I get more time off than most, but I have to take a full week at a time - a break is a full week, or two full weeks, or three, but not extendable by an extra couple of days.)
> "fuck it I'm not driving that far in one day" numbers
Yeah this is what gets lost in most conversations. The fraction of the population doing marathon road trips is actually pretty small. The average is more like 400-500 miles a day. That's a single stop at lunch time, rinse and repeat each day.
How badly has that pack degraded if you have to charge after 2 hours? We have a 2021 Tesla Y and can drive for 4 hours before needing to charge--assuming we start fully charged. The math doesn't seem to be mathing here.
OP is leaving something out of this story, because a 2hr trip is around ~130 miles. An EV with "300 mile" range can fairly reliably do 260 miles, and worse case, a quick 5 minute fast charge can get you the rest of the way home.
Something has to be very wrong if you're charging at all on a three hour trip, or taking an hour to charge. Do you have one of those mythical Canada-only stripper models that Tesla created as a dodge around regulations? One of those with a degraded battery is about the only way you can find yourself with a range barely over 100 miles.
I just recently did a 422 mile trip. Needed one 11 minute recharging stop.
Given that you only really need 240 volts (or maybe 3 phase longer term), I don't see why every parking space, street, public and private can't have a power socket.
It's already happening in some places, maybe one day it'll be mandated.
I briefly worked with some people trying to "solve" this in the US. There's two major obstacles:
1: The power company is slow as molasses making new connections.
2: The networking protocols used for billing are "creative" and unreliable. This is why many EV charging stations don't work or don't take credit cards. (Basically, the protocol has too many options and spends far too much effort on pointless certificate exchanges.)
Building on that...
> I don't see why every parking space, street, public and private can't have a power socket.
Because if everybody plugs in at roughly the same time (think of everyone arriving home from work in the evening,) load will go much higher than the electrical service can handle. No modern apartment building or parking garage simply has enough wiring and transformers to handle all that: It requires the chargers to coordinate among themselves to artificially slow themselves down to keep the load low enough so it doesn't trip a breaker somewhere.
I thought this but after 3 years I can say it is unfounded. the only reason I ever think about my state of charge on the city is when I need it to be low so I can use street parking that requires me to charge.
We really need more slow charging stations for folks to just park at. I’d have assumed that the economics would have been favorable to charge by the day/night rather than by the minute.
There’s a genuine technical issue: the AC EVSE protocols (J1772, NACS, etc) have several safety features that are far in excess of anything you’ll find in a regular 15A NEMA receptacle. I don’t think it would be wise to gave high traffic NEMA receptacles on fully weather-exposed streetlights.
The hardware for the safety systems would not be expensive in volume, but the cable and connector are expensive and bulky. And none of the EVSE standards are specified in a variant where the receptacle is fixed and the car carries the cable.
This is solvable, obviously. I don’t know whether drivers would want to deal with having their own cables, though.
AIUI, Tesla really screwed the pooch here. For the original Model S, Tesla really really wanted the US model to tuck the charge socket under the little hinged reflector, and they couldn’t figure out how to fit the Type 2 “Mennekes” connector their. So they invented their own socket (which evolved into NACS), and the Tesla one is rather inferior to Type 2, at least when used for AC charging.
And now every EV needs to have a different charge port configuration for North America vs Europe, and North America is stuck with NACS. (NACS is fine for DC but still sucks for AC. It cannot support 3-phase charging (which I admit has always seemed like a silly feature except in the limited case of 1 or 2 chargers in a single family residence), and cables and adapters cannot passively report their current rating. So you would need to build a kind of gnarly active MITM system to make a safe extension cable, whereas a Type 2 to Type 2 cable is built part of the Type 2 design.
Later, Tesla proved the whole thing pointless by successfully fitting Type 2 in the same location…
I think the timeline is a bit off. When Tesla designed its connector, Type 2 wasn’t yet the established European standard. Tesla had shown its proprietary connector by 2011 and shipped it in 2012; Type 2 wasn’t selected as Europe’s common connector until 2013.
When Tesla later engineered the European Model S, it needed three-phase AC and adopted a modified Type 2 connector, which fitted behind essentially the same tail light door.
But that’s all history now.
Arguably both markets ended up with good solutions for their needs: NACS is exceptionally compact and well suited to North American single-phase AC plus DC fast charging, while Type 2 is larger but supports Europe’s widespread three-phase AC.
3 phase has a property that the total power is (with fully balanced loads and no harmonics) constant. But n phases, equally spaced in phase angle, each an RMS voltage V from ground, with RMS current I per phase in phase with the voltage to ground, gives power n•V•I. (I’m assuming that n>=2 so that there is no neutral current.) There’s no savings for n=3 vs n=2.
There is a savings over the system in which you use 2 of 3 phases, which gives unbalanced phase angles. And that system is widely used in the US in non-single-family installations. But if you have a bunch of chargers, you put 1/3 of them on each of the pairs of phases, and everything balances back out at the panel whenever a decent number of chargers are in use.
Maybe, if a a car could rely on having 3 phases, it could avoid some ripple filtering by taking advantage of constant supply power (no 2f component), but cars need to be able to charge from a single phase even in Europe.
European Model S has Type 2 in that location, only ones that don't fit is the Type 2 CCS with giant DCFC pins below the regular Type 2. NACS is just Tesla doing Apple.
No, the cable you carry for AC charging has a Type 2 connector on both sides, it's purely an EV charging cable. It's not the same 3-phase plug you'd plug a table saw into.
Probably not. Often that 15a is shared with several others nearby. In many cases there is a light sensor on one light that controls them all. Sometimes the transformers that supplies them isn't big enough for more load.
Of course easy city and decade did something different so there is no universal. However issues like the above will mean it isn't easy. You need to examine each street on a case by cases bases and that makes it hard even though the work for any individual street isn't hard. Where it works great, but it isn't easy anymore.
That said, for all new lights they should all have a charger built in. The cost is small and quantity will bring it down even more.
There is not enough street lamps to charge a meaningful fraction of cars. I mean, look at the streets, there is so, so many cars, parked everywhere they can fit.
But I agree in principle - the power wiring is there already, it's a matter of spamming cheap low-power outlets wherever cars tend to congregate for a rest.
Is the hybrid car then just a social cover for “I want gas savings, but where I live doesn’t have EVSEs?”
It almost reminds me of mechanical alarm clocks from the 70s, where they are designed to look like an electronic model but are just driven by AC motors (1).
It looks to me like an EV makes as much sense in Texas as anywhere. The places where EVs don't make sense currently have average gas prices but high electricity prices, like the Northeast.
Are they though? I mean you also don't have a gas station at the curb but you get by. Maybe you just need to charge at a public charging point. Just because you have an EV doesn't mean you absolute NEED to charge at home for it to make sense.
I can fill my 35L tank, pay, and be on my way in about 2 minutes. That gives me about 750km of autonomy. That's why I don't mind not having a gas station at the curb.
I can also show up at the gas station at any moment with a reasonable upper wait limit.
It's a bit disingenuous to ignore the downsides of not being able to charge at home. Public charging points may not exist, be too few, or be taken. If you drive enough, then you somewhat need to structure your life around charging your car.
Thankfully we're getting close to ~10 mins to go from 10% to 80% charge with newer models. Battery tech is actually advancing very steadily, so it won't be long for this to trickle down to cheaper models either.
Rules are also going in the right direction where I live. The onus is now on the homeowner association to justify denying you the permission to install a charging spot by your private parking space.
I luckily live in a building with reasonable people, but it's the exception rather than the rule.
I'd correct this to be "a smaller sized EV" versus "the smaller size of an EV" as many of the EVs on the market are surprisingly big. Without pointing to the obvious behemoth truck/SUV EVs, my Tesla MY is considerably larger than a lot of CUVs on the market and has a much worse turning radius. What it does do well is stop and start fast meaning I can be more decisive and navigate through messy NYC/BOS traffic with more confidence than in my CRV, and regen braking + having lower "idling" costs does improve its city-profile.
That's the irony of EVs. They're most useful in cities--short driving distances and less emissions in dense areas, but easiest for the consumer to use in the burbs where driving distances are longer and emissions are less of an issue.
I'd say they're most useful in suburbs. You can charge them overnight in your driveway or garage so there's almost no reason not to have one unless you're really focused on the road trip scenario but that's an issue for city cars too.
Even still, people driving from the suburbs to the city are a large part of emissions. People living in the city are already likely to use transit for some trips and so are going to make less emissions. Also for emissions we really shouldn't separate the suburb from the city - they are too close to each other and so one affects the other.
People who live in cities often don't drive that much, so they don't need to charge that often - I drive like 400 km per month, meaning I'd have to charge once a month on most modern EVs.
Also even in the sprawl, people usually don't drive hundreds of kilometers s day.
Sorry, but how are these two related? What point are you trying to make? I live in the capital of a smaller European country and there's enough of both for it to be viable for me to own an EV. I believe it's the same in other larger cities and towns in the country (and smaller ones with malls or close to highways), then there's the weird gap of smaller towns that don't have enough chargers, but where many people live in apartment blocks with street parking, and then there's the countryside with small villages where people usually park in front of their house (and can charge at home easily).
I live in West Seattle and own an EV. There still is not enough easily accessible charging infrastructure, requiring users to constantly monitor and go out of their way to use the only level2 pole station available in the neighborhood.
The nearest level3 is off the peninsula and both are under repair.
The point is that charging infrastructure is still being built out. EV is not for everyone (yet)
> The point is that charging infrastructure is still being built out.
I know that EV infra generally sucks in the US, but don't people understand that more than 96% people on the planet live elsewhere? Often in places where EVs work just fine?
Most people are not fluent in English and not technically inclined. While I haven't seen real numbers I would expect a bit over half of the people here do live in the US.
> Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute, an EV will likely work just fine for you.
Whoa, you're leaving out some pretty big demographics.
There are also a lot of people (the majority of people?) for whom EV charging is inconvenient or impossible -- apartment dwellers and people without driveways.
(Yes, yes, some apartments offer EV charging and some people without driveways can just run a charger out to the street)
Are you from a main Spanish city? Because the chargers are being set up but not so fast, and parking is not exactly an easy thing to find for most people.
I really think relying on public chargers isn't a problem for hundreds of millions of people all over the world and I'd like people to consider getting an EV as their next car.
You disagree, but my post doesn't say anything about city trips..? I use public transport in the city. I use the car to visit family in the countryside (about 100 km away) and to go on trips and vacations. The EV works beautifully for all that.
The coolest type of hybrid is obviously Toyota's original Prius design with the power split system. The point of it just to have a really efficient petrol car. If having a petrol car isn't something you want, then don't go hybrid.
Round here Toyotas almost immediately took over the taxi market. They're ideal for that use case: high milage, but stop/start in cities. Not seen many pure EV taxis yet apart from the occasional Tesla.
BEV deployment seems to be following fixed infrastructure. In Europe you can see it spreading out from Norway. Various mundane factors like "do I know there's charge points near where I go" and "does anyone I know drive an EV" affect adoption. That's why I quite like the UK green number plate stripe, it's a near costless bit of official EV promotion.
In Australia (Melbourne), EVs have taken over the taxi/Uber/DiDi services, the city is a 50km radius semicircle, and the airport is a fair distance from the CBD.
The charging network is still being built out, but for these type of services, it's a no brainer.
Just saw my first FedEx EV truck (inner city Melbourne) and all the posties use EV trikes.
>>EREVs/series hybrids don't get better fuel economy
They sure do if 80% of your driving is done purely on battery, which is how nearly every Volt owner I know operates. Once every couple weeks they'll exceed their EV range, let the gas engine take over, and be done with it. The fuel is sipped so infrequently the car will require a "maintenance mode" to run fluids through the ICE but the car is still perfectly useful for a last minute blitz to St Louis or whatever.
I love the Volt. I personally have an i3 REX and I love it even more because it is absurdly lightweight and RWD.
>>Just get an EV
What about renters who don't have access to level 2 charging? The small battery in an EREV can be easily topped up with a normal extension cord (20 amp rated) run out of a rented house or apartment to the car.
Alternately, what about people who can only afford or have the space for one car? Not everyone wants to own the small city EV + ICE road trip car wombo combo, nor do people want to spin the roulette wheel of charging infrastructure that is still barley adequate, especially in the flyover states.
One thing that always puzzled me was how the gas engines in hybrids were so efficient. Technology Connections has a great video explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnUFH5GX_fI
tl;dw: constant RPM and a weird stroke geometry where the power stroke is longer than the other strokes to extract more energy from the expanding gasses.
Glad you discovered the gem he is! What made me appreciate his expertise first? Most people use a dish washer wrong. His video will break it all down to help one understand how to use the typical dish washer in the right practical ways in which it was engineered.
Yes, but it doesn't mean the overall system is better because of losses during the power conversion. It's usually better to have the engine driving the wheels directly which is possible with a continuously-variable transmission (CVT).
I'm surprised there isn't more effort to create hybrids in reverse--an electric car with optional gas generator. The gas generator could run at constant speed, never changing RMP, while the battery handles constant changes in acceleration. The idea is not mine. I've heard about it in China
I think it's also because EREVs need a performant generator that isn't much different from the drive motor. So you'll have a full ICE+EV drivetrain on top of an EV as its battery for it to work, which is not ideal.
Compared to that, other hybrid systems like the motor-clutch combo packs that sit between the ICE and gearbox, as well as the fixed gear Toyota systems, can have motors that are weaker, lighter, and cheaper than the ICE, while being able to be additive to the ICE power output. That makes more efficient use of steel and copper than full serial setups.
BMW i3 had such EREV option, but it apparently used a cheap OEM bike engine(not like a BMW Motorrad engine) and also could not overcome power draw of the EV drive motor. So it literally just extended the range, not allowing it to run indefinitely at highway speeds with just refueling. Nissan e-POWER system is powerful enough to do that, but then the readers of comment will have to back to the line 3.
People claim the EREV i3 won't do extended highway but I did Boston MA to Wichita KS in one shot in my 2014 with a hurt battery using Hold State Of Charge mode starting at a 75% battery charge and using a 7 gallon fuel cell in the frunk with a transfer pump to allow longer stretches between refueling. It worked a treat. I have since removed the additional fuel system once I got to Wichita and now it is my daily commuter and goes 2000+ miles between fillups.
I've done some long trips with my i3. The key is to turn the engine on when the battery reaches 75%. The battery then absorbed the large power draws when accelerating or going up big hills. The engine does vary in RPM depending on my power draw, and by the end of my trip, the battery is usually not significantly lower, maybe around 60%. I usually turn off the engine when I'm almost at my destination so I can use the remaining battery energy.
Yeah. I'd love a decent plug-in EREV in the US. The 2027 Rogue appears to NOT have a plug-in option at the moment.
I can't fathom buying an EV and still only getting 40 MPG and needing to buy gas. Ninety percent of my trips are < 40 miles round trip and could be handled by a modest 15kWh battery. For that last ten percent, I'd happily use some gas to not have to worry about charging on the route.
Mazda had (has?) some cool EREVs using rotary engines as the power plant. Though sadly without plans to bring them to the US.
That is exactly what ePOWER is, that configuration is called a series hybrid and is more commonly seen in heavy industry like diesel trains or trucks in the mines (for better or worse).
More recently effort is also going into series hybrids for public road haulers, which I personally think is a great application for it since you can potentially put a lot of the equipment into a hot-swappable dolly.
I drove a Nissan Note (Nismo esition) with ePower and it could happily spin the wheels when taking off, not something you normally get out of a tiny economy hatchback. I think it has 140kw electric drivetrain? 140kw is pretty sporty when delivered instantly.
What you are referring to is usually referred to as an EREV (Extended Range Electrical Vehicle). The reason legacy manufacturers market their less efficient plugin hybrid and non plugin hybrids (100% of the power comes from petrol) instead is because that's what they have and want to milk for as long as possible. In terms of drive train these are more complex to manufacture and more costly to maintain than an EREV. EREVs typically have slightly larger batteries than a typical PHEV as well. Typical electrical ranges are at least 80-100 miles or more in some cases. Usually the cars are available as without the range extender as well. This is less common for PHEVs and hybrids. Though of course some legacy manufacturers are still trying to push compromise cars. Like Nissan in this case.
Nissan has been really struggling for the last few years, this new hybrid engine doesn't look like it will turn things around for them to me.
EREVs are an idea that is not new and also relevant in shipping and aviation. Many modern large ships (oil tankers, cruise ships, etc.) are already EREVs effectively: an electrical motor drives the propeller and a generator powers the motor.
And there are are a few plane designs that are using small batteries + generators to power flight. It makes a lot of sense: electrical motors are a lot simpler, lighter and cheaper to maintain. Engine maintenance is very costly in aviation. And so is fuel. The recently announced X1 is a good example of a plane that does this. There are a few other manufacturers working on this as well. Early days but the potentially large fuel savings probably ensure this is going to happen one way or another.
EREVs aren't magic. They make sense for some applications but less efficient than mechanically coupling the engine to the wheels. If the user is going to run mostly on fossil fuels due to trip distance or lack of available battery chargers then a parallel hybrid design like the standard Toyota Prius model is generally a better design.
Range extender EVs made a lot more sense a decade a go when batteries were much more expensive, and fast chargers were not yet ubiquitous. Then range extenders were more affordable than EVs and could go to places EVs couldn't.
Now these EREVs are mostly luxury niche of big cars (where extra space taken by two power trains doesn't matter) for people who don't want to spend 20 minutes at rapid chargers on that yearly long trip they do. Or for people who live in some global warming ignoring backwater[1] that hasn't built out rapid charger yet.
[1] even China has ubiquitous fast charging network now
We just drove from the UK to Portugal (via ferry). They were in the electric car and anxious about the next charger almost entire time.
The only thing worse than the staple "all chargers except one broken, wait time 1h+", was the ghost charging station existing only on the map - they drove there only to see the empty field instead.
Needless to say we barely made it in time for the ferry (their refueling was about 3 hours total in the UK alone), and sadly won't make me getting EV as the main car anytime soon.
Second, small town car for errands, maybe, but that means having no comfort or equipment I'd like to have in the "main" car (and half of it is safety).
Also - note you seem to suggest the mythical ubiquity of the fast chargers is the solution to the range, but they're also so expensive to use that any savings from the local driving and charging at home (if someone is lucky enough to own a house with garage or off-street parking) is immediately burned on the first longer trip.
China is the first country I would expect to have ubiquitous fast charging. They are years ahead of the west in the EV rollout. Also high speed rail, robotics, high tech manufacturing in general is kind of their jam now.
> China is the first country I would expect to have ubiquitous fast charging.
Everywhere in China? China is a large place. My money would be on a small rich country that’s (almost) entirely a city. Monaco, Singapore, maybe Luxembourg.
Googling gives me https://transition-energetique.gouv.mc/en/themes/mobility/mo... which doesn’t mention fast C
charging but says “Every Monegasque resident is now less than 200 metres from a free public charging point” ⇒ it wouldn’t surprise me if Monaco already meets your definition of “ubiquitous fast charging”
Maybe 80% of Monaco residents are millionaires / billionaires from other countries, be it Europe or rest of the world, mostly for tax evasion purposes. This includes many many professional sport persons who launder their sponsor income thus helping then getting millionaires surprisingly quickly, while public funds in their countries where they actually live and represent ie on olympics crumble.
#1 reason why I shy away from all professional sports with serious money involved, it just turns into typical ugly business with skewed incentives, while actual sport ends up being just a necessary afterthought.
Better apartments there cost often 10-20 million euros, there are special controls in laws (ie employment) ensuring better treatment of those few Monaco citizens that are there. Most tax avoiding folks like those sportsmen rent just po box to get some sort of special residence. Most people you can actually meet there live in France and commute daily.
That place is a special bubble even within bubbles, nothing that applies there should be expected to apply elsewhere, apart from similar places (of which I am not that aware of maybe apart from San Marino, ie Singapore is more like a real tiny country with actual serious business in trading and transportation).
Just got a Tesla. I was worried about travel through western Iowa, it seemed fairly worst case looking at the map of my route, because I’m not on the interstate and the Tesla superchargers aren’t near my route. To my surprise, it was a non-issue. Modern EVs have enough range and there are indeed just enough chargers.
That is my objection. There are just enough chargers. However only if you plan around chargers. There is a gas station in nearly every small town. You can safely say any town that can't support a gas station cannot support anything else (no stores, bars, restaurants) and only rarely be wrong. Most small towns don't have a charger at all, and if they do it is often level 2 which means stay overnight to get useful range. (I don't understand these - the ones I've seen are not near anyplace you might stay overnight)
I think there's a common misconception by non-EV drivers that every charge you have to wait until the battery is full - you don't. You just have to charge enough to get to your next stop.
If you're in a small town with a level 2 charger at a city park, you just charge enough to get back to civilization. Then hit the fast charger when you're back to the main highway.
Yeah, it takes a little planning to hit charging stops - but it's not actually much planning. And the built-in navigation takes care of most of it for you anyway. I was genuinely surprised on my first trip (again, through not-EV-friendly territory) how much of a non-issue it was in practice, and how much I didn't feel like I was waiting on chargers (even relatively slow "fast chargers"). I just took my time using the restroom, grabbed a fresh drink, checked my notifications on my phone, and it was time to head out again.
I own and drive an EV. I know what they are really like and you are trying to wand wave away things as not a big deal that are a big deal.
You seem to have a misconception about how far it is from a small town to a anywhere else. Your 1 hour at a level 2 charger will get you about 15 minutes down the road - where will find the closest public charger in the previous town that you just left. There are a lot of small towns there are over an hour drive to the nearest highway that has level 3 chargers. Even on the highway the level 3 chargers are often an hour apart. So figure 8 hours at the public charger in the small town to hit the nearest level 3 charger.
> it takes a little planning to hit charging stops - but it's not actually much planning
You know how much planning I do when I take the gas car: almost always 0. I know that I'm never more than 15 minutes from a gas station so I just plan on stopping at the next gas when the gauge start to get close to empty and I'm always fine. There is one trip I sometimes make where the gas states are 30 minutes apart (through desert that is almost uninhabited) , and I'm careful to ensure I have fuel before driving that section.
My EV is a GM where I can't use the car's nav system without paying a subscription which I don't. It works fine for most trips, but I wouldn't not recommenced it for road trips or when going small towns.
The people living in small town rural areas never need to buy an EV. They are such a tiny sliver of the population that they can have their gas cars forever and the climate won't notice.
The fears and anxieties of that small shaving of people is simply a misguided talking point about EV viability.
> Your 1 hour at a level 2 charger will get you about 15 minutes down the road
A level 2 charger adds about 40 miles to a Model 3 or Model Y in an hour of charging. I don't know what you drive that is so much less efficient. 8 hours on a level 2 would fill the battery, not just get you to the next charger.
> I know that I'm never more than 15 minutes from a gas station
You're being dramatic the other direction here - plenty of routes have you more than 15 minutes from a gas station, including the one I described in my prior post.
I'm sure there are places where it actually is a little tricky. Maybe more so depending on vehicles (Tesla does seem to be the best experience, by a lot). That doesn't change the fact that good EVs are just not a big deal to travel with anymore.
Having done many road trips in a Tesla, I don't believe this is true. My trips were in the south west though. I'm sure there are areas where it is a problem but it depends.
I feel like this road trip thing is over exaggerated. What if we (as a society) rented a Toyota Sienna or something equally boring when we need to go on a road trip?
The cost of a rental car for a week is high - you can pay for a lot of gas for the cost of renting a car a few times a year.
More than one person I know has tried to rent a car and discovered they didn't have any on the day they went to pick it up. If your car can make the trip you avoid all the issue.
Note the above is about road trips. If you are flying (or taking the train) someplace than you will rent anyway (or have some other plans). However one of the advantages of road trips is you take your own car.
The volt was never popular enough, unfortunately. Right around the time we were looking to buy a new car, and had the Volt high on our list, the retired the product line.
GM has a good lineup of EVs now. They somehow don't get recognized for them, but they do. (I own one - the only problem is it doesn't support Android Auto which is enough that I give them a don't buy)
I've yet to meet a Volt owner who wasn't fanatically obsessed with theirs (myself included). One common theory for poor sales is that dealers tend to make more on service revenue than the actual sale, and Volts run forever with very little maintenance, but I don't know if that's just speculation. I've heard anecdotes of buyers walking in ready to write a check for a Volt, and the salesperson tried to discourage them and steer them towards an ICE vehicle instead.
I really love what Edison are doing, I have no skin in the game I just think it's a great business ethos.
Feom a fictional perspective I also dig the rugged blend of electric industrial equipment and utilitarian design. Like a mad-max solar punk, rather than a utopian one.
I picture them pulling up to a makeshift solar outpost en-route, in the middle of the wasteland desert, covered in red dust, the thick sheet metal scarred from raiders...
It seems to me you’re talking about a range extender, which lots of Chinese EV makers use. Many do buy them but sometimes you get the worst of both worlds: weighty like an EV and the heat, vibration, exhaust of a petro car. For most people the extended range is only needed very occasionally but you have to carry the ICE system the whole time.
Depending on the compromises you're willing to make, a small gas engine that doesn't run very often isn't a lot of excess weight, and it's not going to make heat, vibration, and exhaust except when it's running ... which could be 30 minutes a month (to keep it healthy) plus whenever you actually need the extended range.
Since it's just for range extension, you could maybe stuff the engine in the rear, so you don't have to pipe exhaust under the whole car. Although then you probably want to pipe coolant to a radiator in the front and have to protect that piping... but at least it's only coolant hot and not exhaust hot. The engine noise would be away from the driver at least.
You said you didn't want the heat of a gas car, but you might choose to run it a little bit more in the cold to help warm the interior on cold days (especially at startup).
Potentially, but not really likely, you could try to make it modular-ish... attach it when you need it, leave it in your garage otherwise. But I think it's going to be too heavy ... I have a 7200 W portable generator which is roughly half of what an EV uses at cruising speeds, and it takes two people to lift it. Automotive engineers do amazing things, but I don't think they're getting twice the power and less weight and easier to move...
The problem is all of that is competing with "just charge it". Over the lifetime of the vehicle now, whatever route you have that is underserved by chargers is likely to gain chargers soon.
The original/first BMW i3 (2013) was like this, full battery electric (with an admittedly small battery 80-160 miles range depending on model), with an "range extender" engine.
Personally I'm a big fan of the EREV (which only drives an alternator, rather than a PHEV which drives the wheels directly) due to the simpler mechanical design - however I'm not sure if it's a personal preference. I feel even a fairly small 30kw (40hp?) would make a huge difference to the utility of the vehicle, while still being small and economical.
You may be interested to read / watch videos of Audi's RS Q e-tron they raced in the Dakar Rally and even won with this type of powertrain - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_RS_Q_e-tron
There were several of them: the first and second generations of Chevy Volt, Fisker Karma, BMW i3, and a couple of Chinese brands.
They're less efficient than parallel hybrids at high speeds (on a freeway). And you also need a fairly sizeable engine to keep up with the consumption at freeway speed, so at this point you might as well just throw in a planetary gearbox.
The Chevy Volt (and it's predecessor the GM 2-mode hybrid, and the Allison power-split hybrid) was a work of art. It is fundamentally a planetary gearbox, with 2 motor-generators.
In ICE mode, under 35 MPH, it worked as a series hybrid. Above 35, the engine mechanically connected to the wheels. One motor-gen extracted power and fed it to the other, acting as a CVT in parallel. This provided the ratio changes needed for the small engine.
It was way too complicated and expensive the two times they tried it (2008, then the Volt). It was successful and lives on to this day in its original application: city buses.
Planetary gear plus 2 motor-generators is 'Toyota Synergy Drive' and also used by Ford and Stellantis in some hybrid models. At least the Ford C-Max and Chrysler Pacifica hybrids use this style drive train. I'm not on top of all the hybrids, but I'd guess if 4 car makers do it, there's others to be found.
It makes a lot of sense, works well, and is very durable... as long as Ford didn't forget to heat treat a bearing or whatever they messed up in early C-Maxes.
I had a 2012 Chevy Volt. It was indeed a delightful car!
But I believe that the series mode was a mistake. The later versions of Volts removed it entirely, improving the fuel economy.
> It was way too complicated and expensive the two times they tried it (2008, then the Volt). It was successful and lives on to this day in its original application: city buses.
I don't think that it was too complicated. Hybrids are using essentially the same system, except that they have a smaller battery and less powerful electric motors.
And the range extender was underpowered. Drive up a hill on a freeway at 70 mph and the battery would deplete and the car would slow down to 25 mph which was the fastest the range extender could make it go up a gentle incline.
It's dangerous to do 25 mph on a freeway... There are some roads I'm too scared to drive my i3 on now.
If you pulled over to let it recharge, it wouldn't do so, since the range extender refuses to run at full throttle when the car isn't moving fast (perhaps no cooling fan??)
Yup, my friends had one and loved it despite the... unique styling.
They live in the Puget Sound area, and both work at the same place. It worked out to where they could do their commute, and ordinary errands entirely on battery, and only needed the range extender if they were going into downtown Seattle or on a road trip or such.
Even my really underpowered PHEV has a 65kW electric motor. No "off the shelf generator" can generate 65kW, in fact it would be a huge unit that could.
We could of course say - well, it doesn't need to match peak usage, it just has to charge the battery faster than it depletes - you still probably need around 20kW for steady motorway driving, and that's a pretty hefty generator.
I don't think you need to have it match the depletion rate. Even at say 10kW you'd doubling the effective range. The point is people want to be able to use their car for that twice a year road trip, or drive to the inlaws for Thanksgiving. If you can attach something that extends the range for these occasion then that's probably enough.
Furthermore, the generator can run 24/7, but realistically you will at most drive ~6 hours a day. So for a leisurely road-trip this may be enough to avoid needing stops at charging stations
You mean like a BMW i3 with a range extender? Little two-cylinder petrol that just spins a genny.
They work, they're not terribly efficient in terms of converting fuel to distance travelled, and really batteries are getting so good these days there's little point any more.
The concept is called range extenders, and the video does explain why it’s one of those false great ideas and every production vehicle has failed: EVs with range extenders are at best bad EVs and at worst terrible hybrids.
These EREVs are going to last one cycle; the solid state battery tech is going to decimate their principal and you will be forced to choose between EREVs that cost slightly less than EVs and still inherit all complications of a hybrid powertrain or just go with the BEV for a few thousand more.
Exactly, as owner of one of the latest versions of Nissan cars with e-Power, I just can say that it is extremely inefficient, especially during winter, plus it isn't recognised at all as hybrid vehicle in Germany (it misses the "E" at the end of the car plate).
For comparison, the full classic gasoline engine with manual gearbox consumes less gasoline than the e-Power one. This is just some pure greenwashing, that isn't even explained at car dealerships and people can't say anything about it, when you ask for information.
We had the X-Trail AWD version of this. The plus side was getting around 850km to a tank of petrol.
However, the EV-only range was very poor and the engine was quite harsh sounding when it spun up.
Super happy to get rid of it and switch to BEV.
Non-plugin hybrids are just regular gas cars. It would be bizarre to give them any sort of preferential treatment in anything, though their rules are already strange to begin with (giving tax advantages to PHEVs and EREVs, which are almost exclusively used as pure gas cars).
I think these kinds of vehicles are fine for countries were fast charging networks are still not widespread. I drove a rental X-Trail e-Power AWD a while ago, and fuel economy, while not spectacular, was still great given the quality of the powertrain. Of course a low displacement manual can get better fuel economy, and an electric will be cheaper, but if you are driving 800km on a country with little charging infrastructure, powertrains like this one or Toyota's eCVTs make sense.
>X-Trail e-Power AWD a while ago, and fuel economy, while not spectacular, was still great
10L/100km on highway, worse than cheaper comparably powerful ordinary diesel. Seems like a pointless car, X-Trail 2.0 dCi M9R was better in every possible way.
Where did you get the 10L/100km figure from? I saw closer to 7L/100km when driving it, and the 2.2 diesel on the older X-Trails has about 100 less horsepower.
Machine guns are just paperweights if arrows are dime a dozen but 6.8x51mm is still at advanced stages of development. EV charging in mechanical parking system is still an unsolved problem and gas filling experience remains more than tolerable.
I am always a bit confused by this argument. You have to drive to a gas station to get fuel but it's not okay to drive to a specific place to charge. Most of the gas station where I live already have a few charging points backed by a big battery. Maybe that's not everywhere but I am not sure they are as rare as they are made out to be.
EV charging needs to sort out the one thing they didn't have to innovate on: payment.
All the novel parts of supplying megawatts of power to consumers were sorted out and work perfectly, which is really impressive work! But paying with a credit card is often impossible? And forget about cash. You often need an app, and god forbid you don't have a data connection.
Sadly, it it should be simpler to charge an EV: power distribution is already ubiquitous, much more so than gas distribution.
In practice (in my experience) the EV infrastructure needs a serious central push before we get there. Beyond payment there are a few more things to sort out:
- High capacity charging is nowhere near as common as gas stations are in most of the US (and everywhere else I've been).
- Charging protocols are mostly sorted out via adapters, but residual annoyances remain, some of which won't be fixed soon (the US mostly distributing 2-phase AC while Europe distributes 3-phase drives one of these).
Most of the public chargers around me are level 2 - hours is correct. Though most are in places where I would expect someone is parking there all day anyway - the parking ramps downtown, campgrounds, and beaches. I don't know what the grocery store with level-2 chargers is thinking though - the range you can get level 2 charging during the typical grocery run isn't worth it. (if the chargers were on the far end where employees park it would make sense, but they are customer parking only)
There are some level 3 chargers, but they are much less common. Maybe your city is different.
Yes, AC chargers aren't meant to be the equivalent of "get gas and get back home". They're sometimes called "destination chargers". You plug your car in because you already need to be there.
If you need to charge the car as fast as possible, you go to a DC charger and you generally spend 5-20 minutes there. In fact, many faster DC chargers will start adding fees for hogging the charger for more than 30 minutes.
This prompted me to check how the UK Costco rollout of EV chargers is going, which seems to be proceeding slowly and is not all that much of a discount at £0.50/kWh. Type 2 plugs so slowish?
The entire metal platform that holds the car is moved around like a data tape in a tape library in mechanical systems. A third rail system to handle L1/L2 EV charging do exist, but upgrades aren't common. I think not many are being newly built but there are many operating in ultra dense areas.
The stupid thing is, yes, modern petrol and diesel cars are stupidly efficient[0], it's not uncommon to see 50-60mpg in a golf-sized car almost regardless of whether it's diesel or petrol.
[0] as long as you don't put them in gigantic american trucks, if I read one more american review saying that 20mpg is "pretty decent".......
- Nissan's petrol engine is the crossbow, a well optimised generator for onboard battery
- Every other brand's EV is the machine gun. About 4 times as energy efficient as a petrol car when you take into account the lifecycle of the vehicle, so probably more when you talk about a hybrid car.
Nissan have decent BEVs, though - the new LEAF is great to drive.
I know the United States is significantly behind the curve on EV adoption, but I really don't understand who would want this, it's the worst of both worlds.
Why bother going to all this effort for an internal combustion engine (crossbow)? Why not spend that money researching 100% EV (machinegun) drive trains?
Its pretty obvious where the future is headed for personal vehicles (yes yes yes I am sure I will get loads of responses where people need to drive 750 miles a day non-stop every day, both ways, towing a boat, up a mountain etc).
It surprises me that these manufacturers like Nissan and Toyota and Honda seem incapable of reacting and changing their product line-up. You can get 100% EV porsches, mercedes, BMWs - hell even Range Rover now and yet these guys are dithering and have basically got only very very half-hearted efforts in EV offerings while apparently trying to pretend its not happening and relying on hybrids.
Meanwhile, at least here in London, I am seeing more and more and more EV BYDs & Jaecoos & MGs etc... so if you care about outward appearances you buy the merc/porsche/etc EV, if you just need a car and don't care what people think you buy the cheap & decent Chinese EV. Toyota, Honda et al don't compete at the luxury end, and they've got nothing to compete with against Chinese EV brands who seem to be taking over the lower end where Toyotas and Nissans etc used to be popular.
It's because street parking is banned nationwide and none of big cities in Japan are interested in EVs. There are close to zero will to make EVs viable in Japanese cities, and people aren't buying unviable products, and Japanese automakers which primarily make products for Japanese middle class which somehow magically sell like hotcakes globally therefore aren't making many EVs.
Nissan is a bit of an outlier in that they are a bit more charitable and more invested in electrification, but they can't ignore the Japanese consumer demand that cars need to be able to run on gas. So they do exactly that, and make an EV with a gas engine that works with existing gas stations.
We saw the same kind of thing with electronics. I'm old enough to remember Sony being the brand to have. But they never really made to jump to digital (or wherever you want to draw the line).
Problem is, EVs are disruptive. Many car companies don't want them because it involves too much change to how they want to do business. They'll try to change when it's too late.
You can get a permit for a gun easily compared to a permit for a modern crossbow in some countries and in others crossbows are e.g. entirely forbidden for hunting.
> To further improve fuel efficiency and output, ZR15DDTe engine uses Nissan's unique STARC*2 concept paired with a large turbocharger.
If we are able to consider fixed RPM operation and are willing to endure turbomachinery, I don't know why we wouldn't just go all in on a gas turbine. You can reduce the number of moving parts dramatically and accept a much wider range of fuels.
Being able to engineer everything around a one fixed operating speed makes a huge engineering difference. Reciprocating engines are responsive to load and speed changes, but there are trade offs in many other categories.
You can also make a gas turbine power module quite small relative to the alternatives. Replacing the it at major service intervals could be made economically viable.
I suspect that the improvement in efficiency is small enough at the scale of an automotive power plant that it wouldn't be worth it.
Reading around suggests that in order to achieve decent efficiency from a gas turbine, you need quite a few supporting systems that only really make economic sense at larger scales (like the 10's of MW scales, not the 100's of kW).
(Although just from a fun technology angle I'd love to see a gas turbine in a car).
The trick in this scenario is the fact that you can run it at a constant RPM + load for a reasonably long duration. The cost of warming up a recuperator and other masses is amortized across a dependable schedule each time. The controller can ensure that the turbine (assuming the drive is long enough) will run for a minimum duration given a certain battery charge level.
The reason this stuff didn't work before is because we couldn't run the turbine this way. Now we have viable energy storage technology and can make some of the most difficult variables into constants.
This has been tried, but back in the day the automatic transmissions weren't really up to it, and they don't really like thermal cycling. And they're noisy. Exact opposite of modern stop/start petrol engines for urban driving.
I also suspect all attempts to keep doing combustion engines for mainstream driving are going to get gradually overtaken and lapped by BEVs.
It was tried in the 60s and 70s, most seriously by Chrysler, and the emissions and drivability weren't great because it was in the "we need to get it working good before we go back and mop up all the other stuff" phase or R&D. The fuel crisis plus the state of automatic transmissions at the tie kept it a back burner item so development was slow and not a priority nor did other OEMs invest seriously.
Chrysler flamboyantly gave this back burner project up and promised to halt further development as part of the wrangling around the government loan they got to save them from bankruptcy in 1979.
Basically it was a song and dance to win political points among the same generation of absolute genius environmentalist who thought moving a steel mill from Ohio where you can regulated it to China where you can't is a win.
I suspect that had the project died a natural death in the 80s rather than being publicly executed as a warning we likely would see some trickle of development these days since they see like a nice natural pairing for various sorts of EVs and CVT powertrains.
It's also worth noting the degree to which facilities and talent pool overlapped between Chrysler, Chrysler Defense, how much more porous the corporate world was 50yr ago and that that Chrysler did ultimately get someone else's turbine into a running driving mass production vehicles in the form of the M1 Abrams so it's not like the technology is unsuitable on a fundamental level.
That would be very cool. I wonder if you could get it through legislation though. I think all the legislation is based around reciprocating IC engines.
You might as well just use a small regular petrol/diesel engine.
The argument about fewer moving parts is often made. But generally turbines are more expensive to make. They require precision engineering. Whereas regular engines (if you've ever worked on one) don't require that nearly as much.
I appreciate this if it's for turbochargers, but turbines share many similarities with them.
Ironically, these solutions would be perfect for boating use, if only they used a diesel engine instead. Regular ICE will not go away anytime soon in marine world and I don't think they see the sales potential here if they developed their powertrains with that usage in mind as well.
Aren't boats typically highly geared direct drive? Hybrid only really benefits when you have lots of changes in speed or are using it for torque conversion as in diesel-electric trains.
This is coming out end of year in the U.S. in the 2027 Rogue. There will also be a gas powered 2027 with a CVT. It will be interesting how they compare, and also how the series hybrid compares to Rav4 or Corolla Cross with a parallel hybrid.
Hopefully it’s better than the second gen. Gas engine front only puts power to one wheel and electric rear only puts power to one wheel while the other two sit idle.
Bad state for a mild 4x4 unless you keep it on pavement.
IIRC both Nissan and Toyota have a dual motor options with super weak rear motors, largely to cover "but snows" arguments. The entire car largely remains to be boring family FWD cars, not like beefy Tesla duals. Maybe GP is referring to those.
Nice to see the packaging improvements, but the modularity of the original leaf motor enabled them to be come a budget staple motor choice for ev conversion
I forgot which marketing name it was, but one of Honda 1-motor systems that used the motor in clutch pack had a major design oversight that it can't handle a traffic jam in an incline, which happens in (of all places)Japan; the HV battery runs out and the car needs to be towed and/or driven at higher speed to both cool down and fill back up. Generator plus traction 2-motor systems feel stupid but it's necessary to cover those situations.
In my mind the alternative to a box car is something like the 8th generation Corolla liftbacks, or station wagons. If they were a little larger, I think they could compete with SUVs with regards to the trade-offs between style and space. I think that station wagons and liftbacks have more room for style than SUVs do.
Seeing a sleek modern car pull away whisper quiet and then start the ICE 3 seconds later with a stutter and a puff of water vapor from underneath is the most schizophrenic sight, it somehow feels more dated than actual ICE cars.
Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute, an EV will likely work just fine for you.
If we put aside 5 hour commute, this describes central Tokyo, not bumfuck nowhere. Bumfuck nowhere has land for offgrid solar and therefore free home charging.
If the city you're in offers free roadside parking with L1 or L2 charging on light poles, good for you, but Tokyo and Japan at large isn't like that at all(unattended roadside parking is banned nationwide and robotic garages are everywhere).
...as one example.
They're in places other than Tokyo as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6blks7vfZog
One was featured in the old Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift movie. That was probably the first time I had seen one, about 20 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHAkCLk6wP8
But I’m not even sure regulators would allow such a design. Even then I’m not sure it’s worth it.
But I am totally done with ICE car maintenance. I want nothing to do with it anymore.
I believe there's also a bunch of Chinese vehicles with similar design, entirely electric drivetrain with gas generators for range extension. Most of these will need to kick in before the battery is empty so that there's some stored energy buffer available for acceleration.
In actuality, at highway speeds I'll burn through 80% of the battery in 3 hours which equals a run rate of 36kWh. If we ran a 5kWh generator the whole time and assume perfect charging efficiency, it'd extend the time to charge by 28 minutes.
My partner and I honestly bought it to be a whole house backup battery. My regions get ice storms and we have hundreds of gallons of aquariums we'd need to keep powered through a long duration power outage. 135 kwh of battery storage cost more than the 135kwh battery truck, so we got a whole house battery backup system with wheels and cruise control. It can backstop 80 amps for 3 days.
Hook it on, plug the connector up and attach your license plate to the back (or use eink).
Hmm. Supposing we need a 6 hour drive at 20 kWh per hour (eschewing specific speed/distance figures), and a generous "smaller battery pack" can provide 3 hours (60 kWh). Then the generator must supply the missing 60 kWh during the 6 hour interval, i.e. a 10 kW generator.
Google says those cost from 1k to 5k USD, and they seem rather beefy.
(Just doing the math out of curiosity, otherwise agree with you.)
Not to mention, loud as all get out at that size.
It also needs a decent amount of maintenance to keep it running (or it needs to run frequently).
Personally... Ev with a swappable battery seems like a much better solution.
The only reason this even sorta makes sense right now is that we're in a really weird transition period where gas is available everywhere and it's still hard to find batteries/chargers.
This isn't a tech problem, it's an infrastructure problem. It should be treated that way.
It's not exactly what you're describing, but I think it will become more common as battery technology growth slows down.
A more practical solution is to just rent out a small generator on a trailer.
Unless I’ve completely misunderstood what you’re getting at.
It's never that simple, but it could be. Modular standard parts that could be installed on a standard chassis design would be great. So have a small generator or an additional battery, maybe even a fuel cell. Probably never happen but it would be the nirvana of car design. Standardization would drive scale and it could work really well. That approach did wonders for the PC industry.
Each of us once a week have to drive far enough that we would public charge and the inconvenience is enough that we are getting a hybrid.
A 2 hr trip becoming a three hour trip only has to happen to you once a week for a few weeks before you realize the limitations.
If you have children or pets along, you will stop more, but then the question is whether the charging areas have the amenities that fuel stations do - available snacks, restrooms, pet relief areas, and at least the Tesla superchargers I have seen generally do not have the same level of availability for those.
Also, 750 km is well within single-day driving. I did 950 km each way in June, with pets and wife, and it took a touch over 11 hours each way (Google Maps estimates 9.5 hours of actual driving time without stops), and I don’t know any other American who would turn that into a two-day drive unless they couldn’t leave early in the morning. Though I’m sure they exist. There really wasn’t a good place to stop after just doing most of the drive. Either halfway, or all the way, or sleep in some awful hotel and eat up the better part of two extra days of your time off. (I get more time off than most, but I have to take a full week at a time - a break is a full week, or two full weeks, or three, but not extendable by an extra couple of days.)
Yeah this is what gets lost in most conversations. The fraction of the population doing marathon road trips is actually pretty small. The average is more like 400-500 miles a day. That's a single stop at lunch time, rinse and repeat each day.
I just recently did a 422 mile trip. Needed one 11 minute recharging stop.
IMO, if you have a place to charge it, go EV. (I have a two-car garage for mine.) Otherwise, stick with ICE until the charging situation improves.
It's already happening in some places, maybe one day it'll be mandated.
1: The power company is slow as molasses making new connections.
2: The networking protocols used for billing are "creative" and unreliable. This is why many EV charging stations don't work or don't take credit cards. (Basically, the protocol has too many options and spends far too much effort on pointless certificate exchanges.)
Building on that...
> I don't see why every parking space, street, public and private can't have a power socket.
Because if everybody plugs in at roughly the same time (think of everyone arriving home from work in the evening,) load will go much higher than the electrical service can handle. No modern apartment building or parking garage simply has enough wiring and transformers to handle all that: It requires the chargers to coordinate among themselves to artificially slow themselves down to keep the load low enough so it doesn't trip a breaker somewhere.
Where I live many requested powergrid connections are put on hold permanently due to lack of capacity.
Hybrids with their good mileage although complex are a good fit for those.
The hardware for the safety systems would not be expensive in volume, but the cable and connector are expensive and bulky. And none of the EVSE standards are specified in a variant where the receptacle is fixed and the car carries the cable.
This is solvable, obviously. I don’t know whether drivers would want to deal with having their own cables, though.
And now every EV needs to have a different charge port configuration for North America vs Europe, and North America is stuck with NACS. (NACS is fine for DC but still sucks for AC. It cannot support 3-phase charging (which I admit has always seemed like a silly feature except in the limited case of 1 or 2 chargers in a single family residence), and cables and adapters cannot passively report their current rating. So you would need to build a kind of gnarly active MITM system to make a safe extension cable, whereas a Type 2 to Type 2 cable is built part of the Type 2 design.
Later, Tesla proved the whole thing pointless by successfully fitting Type 2 in the same location…
When Tesla later engineered the European Model S, it needed three-phase AC and adopted a modified Type 2 connector, which fitted behind essentially the same tail light door.
But that’s all history now.
Arguably both markets ended up with good solutions for their needs: NACS is exceptionally compact and well suited to North American single-phase AC plus DC fast charging, while Type 2 is larger but supports Europe’s widespread three-phase AC.
Well, 3phase is more efficient as you have less losses in the cabling.
May save you 5-10% on the bill.
There is a savings over the system in which you use 2 of 3 phases, which gives unbalanced phase angles. And that system is widely used in the US in non-single-family installations. But if you have a bunch of chargers, you put 1/3 of them on each of the pairs of phases, and everything balances back out at the panel whenever a decent number of chargers are in use.
Maybe, if a a car could rely on having 3 phases, it could avoid some ripple filtering by taking advantage of constant supply power (no 2f component), but cars need to be able to charge from a single phase even in Europe.
Of course easy city and decade did something different so there is no universal. However issues like the above will mean it isn't easy. You need to examine each street on a case by cases bases and that makes it hard even though the work for any individual street isn't hard. Where it works great, but it isn't easy anymore.
That said, for all new lights they should all have a charger built in. The cost is small and quantity will bring it down even more.
But I agree in principle - the power wiring is there already, it's a matter of spamming cheap low-power outlets wherever cars tend to congregate for a rest.
This should really be handled in the car and through the charging cable.
It almost reminds me of mechanical alarm clocks from the 70s, where they are designed to look like an electronic model but are just driven by AC motors (1).
(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zWqweWjsbU
They worked on the same principle as the old mechanical signs at airports and train stations.
So it was mechanical first with the motors, then the LED display and then LCD and then the current TFT etc.
For example in the US it makes perfect sense to own an EV in California, but no sense in Texas for example.
The above is for most people. There are exceptions in both states where gas makes more sense.
It looks to me like an EV makes as much sense in Texas as anywhere. The places where EVs don't make sense currently have average gas prices but high electricity prices, like the Northeast.
[0] https://gasprices.aaa.com/todays-state-averages/
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/gas-taxes-state/
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/08/07/governor-newsom-announces-...
I can also show up at the gas station at any moment with a reasonable upper wait limit.
It's a bit disingenuous to ignore the downsides of not being able to charge at home. Public charging points may not exist, be too few, or be taken. If you drive enough, then you somewhat need to structure your life around charging your car.
I luckily live in a building with reasonable people, but it's the exception rather than the rule.
The smaller size of an EV would be more useful in most European cities, at least.
Also even in the sprawl, people usually don't drive hundreds of kilometers s day.
Parking during charging is often the only option. E.g. Gent even had parking only for rented BEVs and car sharing BEVs.
So, I don't know what you are talking about at all. There a restricted zones were you aren't even allowed to enter with an ICE.
The nearest level3 is off the peninsula and both are under repair.
The point is that charging infrastructure is still being built out. EV is not for everyone (yet)
I know that EV infra generally sucks in the US, but don't people understand that more than 96% people on the planet live elsewhere? Often in places where EVs work just fine?
I dunno. Ask the OP.
Whoa, you're leaving out some pretty big demographics.
There are also a lot of people (the majority of people?) for whom EV charging is inconvenient or impossible -- apartment dwellers and people without driveways.
(Yes, yes, some apartments offer EV charging and some people without driveways can just run a charger out to the street)
I have a car and use it only to go OUTSIDE the city, road trips and to the mountains / sea. That's why I think a hybrid is still the best option.
BEV deployment seems to be following fixed infrastructure. In Europe you can see it spreading out from Norway. Various mundane factors like "do I know there's charge points near where I go" and "does anyone I know drive an EV" affect adoption. That's why I quite like the UK green number plate stripe, it's a near costless bit of official EV promotion.
The charging network is still being built out, but for these type of services, it's a no brainer.
Just saw my first FedEx EV truck (inner city Melbourne) and all the posties use EV trikes.
>>EREVs/series hybrids don't get better fuel economy
They sure do if 80% of your driving is done purely on battery, which is how nearly every Volt owner I know operates. Once every couple weeks they'll exceed their EV range, let the gas engine take over, and be done with it. The fuel is sipped so infrequently the car will require a "maintenance mode" to run fluids through the ICE but the car is still perfectly useful for a last minute blitz to St Louis or whatever.
I love the Volt. I personally have an i3 REX and I love it even more because it is absurdly lightweight and RWD.
>>Just get an EV
What about renters who don't have access to level 2 charging? The small battery in an EREV can be easily topped up with a normal extension cord (20 amp rated) run out of a rented house or apartment to the car.
Alternately, what about people who can only afford or have the space for one car? Not everyone wants to own the small city EV + ICE road trip car wombo combo, nor do people want to spin the roulette wheel of charging infrastructure that is still barley adequate, especially in the flyover states.
tl;dw: constant RPM and a weird stroke geometry where the power stroke is longer than the other strokes to extract more energy from the expanding gasses.
A.k.a. Atkinson-cycle (1882): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson_cycle
And yes the Atkinson cycle helps
I think it's also because EREVs need a performant generator that isn't much different from the drive motor. So you'll have a full ICE+EV drivetrain on top of an EV as its battery for it to work, which is not ideal.
Compared to that, other hybrid systems like the motor-clutch combo packs that sit between the ICE and gearbox, as well as the fixed gear Toyota systems, can have motors that are weaker, lighter, and cheaper than the ICE, while being able to be additive to the ICE power output. That makes more efficient use of steel and copper than full serial setups.
BMW i3 had such EREV option, but it apparently used a cheap OEM bike engine(not like a BMW Motorrad engine) and also could not overcome power draw of the EV drive motor. So it literally just extended the range, not allowing it to run indefinitely at highway speeds with just refueling. Nissan e-POWER system is powerful enough to do that, but then the readers of comment will have to back to the line 3.
I can't fathom buying an EV and still only getting 40 MPG and needing to buy gas. Ninety percent of my trips are < 40 miles round trip and could be handled by a modest 15kWh battery. For that last ten percent, I'd happily use some gas to not have to worry about charging on the route.
Mazda had (has?) some cool EREVs using rotary engines as the power plant. Though sadly without plans to bring them to the US.
More recently effort is also going into series hybrids for public road haulers, which I personally think is a great application for it since you can potentially put a lot of the equipment into a hot-swappable dolly.
I drove a Nissan Note (Nismo esition) with ePower and it could happily spin the wheels when taking off, not something you normally get out of a tiny economy hatchback. I think it has 140kw electric drivetrain? 140kw is pretty sporty when delivered instantly.
Nissan has been really struggling for the last few years, this new hybrid engine doesn't look like it will turn things around for them to me.
EREVs are an idea that is not new and also relevant in shipping and aviation. Many modern large ships (oil tankers, cruise ships, etc.) are already EREVs effectively: an electrical motor drives the propeller and a generator powers the motor.
And there are are a few plane designs that are using small batteries + generators to power flight. It makes a lot of sense: electrical motors are a lot simpler, lighter and cheaper to maintain. Engine maintenance is very costly in aviation. And so is fuel. The recently announced X1 is a good example of a plane that does this. There are a few other manufacturers working on this as well. Early days but the potentially large fuel savings probably ensure this is going to happen one way or another.
Now these EREVs are mostly luxury niche of big cars (where extra space taken by two power trains doesn't matter) for people who don't want to spend 20 minutes at rapid chargers on that yearly long trip they do. Or for people who live in some global warming ignoring backwater[1] that hasn't built out rapid charger yet.
[1] even China has ubiquitous fast charging network now
The only thing worse than the staple "all chargers except one broken, wait time 1h+", was the ghost charging station existing only on the map - they drove there only to see the empty field instead.
Needless to say we barely made it in time for the ferry (their refueling was about 3 hours total in the UK alone), and sadly won't make me getting EV as the main car anytime soon.
Second, small town car for errands, maybe, but that means having no comfort or equipment I'd like to have in the "main" car (and half of it is safety).
Also - note you seem to suggest the mythical ubiquity of the fast chargers is the solution to the range, but they're also so expensive to use that any savings from the local driving and charging at home (if someone is lucky enough to own a house with garage or off-street parking) is immediately burned on the first longer trip.
These people stoke a lot of fear about EVs despite being a tiny fraction of the population.
Everywhere in China? China is a large place. My money would be on a small rich country that’s (almost) entirely a city. Monaco, Singapore, maybe Luxembourg.
Googling gives me https://transition-energetique.gouv.mc/en/themes/mobility/mo... which doesn’t mention fast C charging but says “Every Monegasque resident is now less than 200 metres from a free public charging point” ⇒ it wouldn’t surprise me if Monaco already meets your definition of “ubiquitous fast charging”
Given the area of the country is 2km, even given its narrow geography that would take all of 50 charging stations to achieve...
#1 reason why I shy away from all professional sports with serious money involved, it just turns into typical ugly business with skewed incentives, while actual sport ends up being just a necessary afterthought.
Better apartments there cost often 10-20 million euros, there are special controls in laws (ie employment) ensuring better treatment of those few Monaco citizens that are there. Most tax avoiding folks like those sportsmen rent just po box to get some sort of special residence. Most people you can actually meet there live in France and commute daily.
That place is a special bubble even within bubbles, nothing that applies there should be expected to apply elsewhere, apart from similar places (of which I am not that aware of maybe apart from San Marino, ie Singapore is more like a real tiny country with actual serious business in trading and transportation).
The capacity issue is specially evident on long weekends or sundays when everyone needs to use the same few chargers.
That is my objection. There are just enough chargers. However only if you plan around chargers. There is a gas station in nearly every small town. You can safely say any town that can't support a gas station cannot support anything else (no stores, bars, restaurants) and only rarely be wrong. Most small towns don't have a charger at all, and if they do it is often level 2 which means stay overnight to get useful range. (I don't understand these - the ones I've seen are not near anyplace you might stay overnight)
If you're in a small town with a level 2 charger at a city park, you just charge enough to get back to civilization. Then hit the fast charger when you're back to the main highway.
Yeah, it takes a little planning to hit charging stops - but it's not actually much planning. And the built-in navigation takes care of most of it for you anyway. I was genuinely surprised on my first trip (again, through not-EV-friendly territory) how much of a non-issue it was in practice, and how much I didn't feel like I was waiting on chargers (even relatively slow "fast chargers"). I just took my time using the restroom, grabbed a fresh drink, checked my notifications on my phone, and it was time to head out again.
You seem to have a misconception about how far it is from a small town to a anywhere else. Your 1 hour at a level 2 charger will get you about 15 minutes down the road - where will find the closest public charger in the previous town that you just left. There are a lot of small towns there are over an hour drive to the nearest highway that has level 3 chargers. Even on the highway the level 3 chargers are often an hour apart. So figure 8 hours at the public charger in the small town to hit the nearest level 3 charger.
> it takes a little planning to hit charging stops - but it's not actually much planning
You know how much planning I do when I take the gas car: almost always 0. I know that I'm never more than 15 minutes from a gas station so I just plan on stopping at the next gas when the gauge start to get close to empty and I'm always fine. There is one trip I sometimes make where the gas states are 30 minutes apart (through desert that is almost uninhabited) , and I'm careful to ensure I have fuel before driving that section.
My EV is a GM where I can't use the car's nav system without paying a subscription which I don't. It works fine for most trips, but I wouldn't not recommenced it for road trips or when going small towns.
The fears and anxieties of that small shaving of people is simply a misguided talking point about EV viability.
A level 2 charger adds about 40 miles to a Model 3 or Model Y in an hour of charging. I don't know what you drive that is so much less efficient. 8 hours on a level 2 would fill the battery, not just get you to the next charger.
> I know that I'm never more than 15 minutes from a gas station You're being dramatic the other direction here - plenty of routes have you more than 15 minutes from a gas station, including the one I described in my prior post.
I'm sure there are places where it actually is a little tricky. Maybe more so depending on vehicles (Tesla does seem to be the best experience, by a lot). That doesn't change the fact that good EVs are just not a big deal to travel with anymore.
While it was possible to accomplish the mission, it wasn't exactly pleasant and required more planning and longer stops.
The cost of a rental car for a week is high - you can pay for a lot of gas for the cost of renting a car a few times a year.
More than one person I know has tried to rent a car and discovered they didn't have any on the day they went to pick it up. If your car can make the trip you avoid all the issue.
Note the above is about road trips. If you are flying (or taking the train) someplace than you will rent anyway (or have some other plans). However one of the advantages of road trips is you take your own car.
https://www.motortrend.com/features/what-is-an-erev-extended...
Disclosure: I have a small investment in them.
Feom a fictional perspective I also dig the rugged blend of electric industrial equipment and utilitarian design. Like a mad-max solar punk, rather than a utopian one.
I picture them pulling up to a makeshift solar outpost en-route, in the middle of the wasteland desert, covered in red dust, the thick sheet metal scarred from raiders...
Since it's just for range extension, you could maybe stuff the engine in the rear, so you don't have to pipe exhaust under the whole car. Although then you probably want to pipe coolant to a radiator in the front and have to protect that piping... but at least it's only coolant hot and not exhaust hot. The engine noise would be away from the driver at least.
You said you didn't want the heat of a gas car, but you might choose to run it a little bit more in the cold to help warm the interior on cold days (especially at startup).
Potentially, but not really likely, you could try to make it modular-ish... attach it when you need it, leave it in your garage otherwise. But I think it's going to be too heavy ... I have a 7200 W portable generator which is roughly half of what an EV uses at cruising speeds, and it takes two people to lift it. Automotive engineers do amazing things, but I don't think they're getting twice the power and less weight and easier to move...
You lose energy converting the the gas power to electrical power to mechanical power. Constant RPM doesn’t matter as much as you think.
They're less efficient than parallel hybrids at high speeds (on a freeway). And you also need a fairly sizeable engine to keep up with the consumption at freeway speed, so at this point you might as well just throw in a planetary gearbox.
In ICE mode, under 35 MPH, it worked as a series hybrid. Above 35, the engine mechanically connected to the wheels. One motor-gen extracted power and fed it to the other, acting as a CVT in parallel. This provided the ratio changes needed for the small engine.
It was way too complicated and expensive the two times they tried it (2008, then the Volt). It was successful and lives on to this day in its original application: city buses.
It makes a lot of sense, works well, and is very durable... as long as Ford didn't forget to heat treat a bearing or whatever they messed up in early C-Maxes.
But I believe that the series mode was a mistake. The later versions of Volts removed it entirely, improving the fuel economy.
> It was way too complicated and expensive the two times they tried it (2008, then the Volt). It was successful and lives on to this day in its original application: city buses.
I don't think that it was too complicated. Hybrids are using essentially the same system, except that they have a smaller battery and less powerful electric motors.
the ICE extender was an option.
It's dangerous to do 25 mph on a freeway... There are some roads I'm too scared to drive my i3 on now.
If you pulled over to let it recharge, it wouldn't do so, since the range extender refuses to run at full throttle when the car isn't moving fast (perhaps no cooling fan??)
They live in the Puget Sound area, and both work at the same place. It worked out to where they could do their commute, and ordinary errands entirely on battery, and only needed the range extender if they were going into downtown Seattle or on a road trip or such.
Even my really underpowered PHEV has a 65kW electric motor. No "off the shelf generator" can generate 65kW, in fact it would be a huge unit that could.
We could of course say - well, it doesn't need to match peak usage, it just has to charge the battery faster than it depletes - you still probably need around 20kW for steady motorway driving, and that's a pretty hefty generator.
Furthermore, the generator can run 24/7, but realistically you will at most drive ~6 hours a day. So for a leisurely road-trip this may be enough to avoid needing stops at charging stations
They work, they're not terribly efficient in terms of converting fuel to distance travelled, and really batteries are getting so good these days there's little point any more.
>From mid-2025, EREV sales in China declined year-on-year for several consecutive months
just in time as Toyota decided to go all EREV https://electrek.co/2026/09/21/toyota-joins-extended-range-e...
>Toyota will make the EREV in China, aiming to produce 200,000 units in 2027. In 2028, production is expected to rise to around 400,000 units.
Hilarious, from promoting fail hydrogen fuel cells and producing anti EV propaganda to chasing fading trends. Anything but real EVs.
> an electric vehicle fitted with a fuel-powered internal combustion engine, acting as a range extender that drives a generator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended-range_electric_vehicl...
For comparison, the full classic gasoline engine with manual gearbox consumes less gasoline than the e-Power one. This is just some pure greenwashing, that isn't even explained at car dealerships and people can't say anything about it, when you ask for information.
Works like (?) an EV, it isn't an EV.
You surely mean that it is not recognized as plug-in hybrid vehicle.
10L/100km on highway, worse than cheaper comparably powerful ordinary diesel. Seems like a pointless car, X-Trail 2.0 dCi M9R was better in every possible way.
All the novel parts of supplying megawatts of power to consumers were sorted out and work perfectly, which is really impressive work! But paying with a credit card is often impossible? And forget about cash. You often need an app, and god forbid you don't have a data connection.
Sadly, it it should be simpler to charge an EV: power distribution is already ubiquitous, much more so than gas distribution.
In practice (in my experience) the EV infrastructure needs a serious central push before we get there. Beyond payment there are a few more things to sort out:
- High capacity charging is nowhere near as common as gas stations are in most of the US (and everywhere else I've been).
- Charging protocols are mostly sorted out via adapters, but residual annoyances remain, some of which won't be fixed soon (the US mostly distributing 2-phase AC while Europe distributes 3-phase drives one of these).
There are some level 3 chargers, but they are much less common. Maybe your city is different.
If you need to charge the car as fast as possible, you go to a DC charger and you generally spend 5-20 minutes there. In fact, many faster DC chargers will start adding fees for hogging the charger for more than 30 minutes.
I'm not familiar with this; don't you just plug it in?
[0] as long as you don't put them in gigantic american trucks, if I read one more american review saying that 20mpg is "pretty decent".......
- Nissan's petrol engine is the crossbow, a well optimised generator for onboard battery
- Every other brand's EV is the machine gun. About 4 times as energy efficient as a petrol car when you take into account the lifecycle of the vehicle, so probably more when you talk about a hybrid car.
Nissan have decent BEVs, though - the new LEAF is great to drive.
I know the United States is significantly behind the curve on EV adoption, but I really don't understand who would want this, it's the worst of both worlds.
Why bother going to all this effort for an internal combustion engine (crossbow)? Why not spend that money researching 100% EV (machinegun) drive trains?
Its pretty obvious where the future is headed for personal vehicles (yes yes yes I am sure I will get loads of responses where people need to drive 750 miles a day non-stop every day, both ways, towing a boat, up a mountain etc).
It surprises me that these manufacturers like Nissan and Toyota and Honda seem incapable of reacting and changing their product line-up. You can get 100% EV porsches, mercedes, BMWs - hell even Range Rover now and yet these guys are dithering and have basically got only very very half-hearted efforts in EV offerings while apparently trying to pretend its not happening and relying on hybrids.
Meanwhile, at least here in London, I am seeing more and more and more EV BYDs & Jaecoos & MGs etc... so if you care about outward appearances you buy the merc/porsche/etc EV, if you just need a car and don't care what people think you buy the cheap & decent Chinese EV. Toyota, Honda et al don't compete at the luxury end, and they've got nothing to compete with against Chinese EV brands who seem to be taking over the lower end where Toyotas and Nissans etc used to be popular.
Nissan is a bit of an outlier in that they are a bit more charitable and more invested in electrification, but they can't ignore the Japanese consumer demand that cars need to be able to run on gas. So they do exactly that, and make an EV with a gas engine that works with existing gas stations.
You got your answer.
We saw the same kind of thing with electronics. I'm old enough to remember Sony being the brand to have. But they never really made to jump to digital (or wherever you want to draw the line).
Problem is, EVs are disruptive. Many car companies don't want them because it involves too much change to how they want to do business. They'll try to change when it's too late.
If we are able to consider fixed RPM operation and are willing to endure turbomachinery, I don't know why we wouldn't just go all in on a gas turbine. You can reduce the number of moving parts dramatically and accept a much wider range of fuels.
Being able to engineer everything around a one fixed operating speed makes a huge engineering difference. Reciprocating engines are responsive to load and speed changes, but there are trade offs in many other categories.
You can also make a gas turbine power module quite small relative to the alternatives. Replacing the it at major service intervals could be made economically viable.
Reading around suggests that in order to achieve decent efficiency from a gas turbine, you need quite a few supporting systems that only really make economic sense at larger scales (like the 10's of MW scales, not the 100's of kW).
(Although just from a fun technology angle I'd love to see a gas turbine in a car).
The reason this stuff didn't work before is because we couldn't run the turbine this way. Now we have viable energy storage technology and can make some of the most difficult variables into constants.
I also suspect all attempts to keep doing combustion engines for mainstream driving are going to get gradually overtaken and lapped by BEVs.
Chrysler flamboyantly gave this back burner project up and promised to halt further development as part of the wrangling around the government loan they got to save them from bankruptcy in 1979.
Basically it was a song and dance to win political points among the same generation of absolute genius environmentalist who thought moving a steel mill from Ohio where you can regulated it to China where you can't is a win.
I suspect that had the project died a natural death in the 80s rather than being publicly executed as a warning we likely would see some trickle of development these days since they see like a nice natural pairing for various sorts of EVs and CVT powertrains.
It's also worth noting the degree to which facilities and talent pool overlapped between Chrysler, Chrysler Defense, how much more porous the corporate world was 50yr ago and that that Chrysler did ultimately get someone else's turbine into a running driving mass production vehicles in the form of the M1 Abrams so it's not like the technology is unsuitable on a fundamental level.
You can extract more energy by adding stages but that increases weight.
While a small and light weight diesel engine is already very close to the theoretical limit.
Cost, reliability.
The argument about fewer moving parts is often made. But generally turbines are more expensive to make. They require precision engineering. Whereas regular engines (if you've ever worked on one) don't require that nearly as much.
I appreciate this if it's for turbochargers, but turbines share many similarities with them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bZu8atQ8lY
BTW, Garett builds/rebuilds turbochargers in many vehicles. If you have a vehicle with a turbo, see if it says 'Garett' on the side.
A turbocharger (compressor) is already about half of a typical Brayton cycle. The power turbine itself can also be radial in design.
Unless you need insane mass flow rates, radial is probably superior to axial.
Brayton cycle does not necessitate a free flowing jet engine style design.
So many questions.
Two motors and e-Pedal driving is the cherry on top imho (e.g. in the 2027 Rouge).