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I think I'm not going to drive EVs until a newer breakthrough with battery tech. There's really not many ways currently to get around the deficiencies with BEV.
For starter, the weight of most EVs are just too much and it impacts handling and tire life.
The other issue is that combustion is just much more efficient with highway highspeed cruising and with a hybrid motor it can give much better efficiency.
For example, with any EV going 65-75mph the range is cut by atleast 30% than going under 50mph.
If you drive an EV at 75mph with a battery range of 200mi it will only lasts about 150-170mi range. While a gas car will lose probably bout the same but a HYBRID car will reduce the loss by 10%.
I can safely drive a Hybrid on the highway above 70mph and not get a serious loss of range vs pure ICE or BEV.
Hybrid is the best choice for highway range over ICE and BEV.
EVs are way more efficient than ICE. What you're noticing is EVs are much more susceptible to how you drive. One way that might help think about it is with an ICE about 80 percent of what you're doing is putting out a lot of wasted heat energy. You can drive like an idiot and really you're only impacting that 20 percent. EVs on the other hand are about 95 percent efficient so how you drive is impacting about 95 percent of the energy use. It's a simplification of what's going on as to why EVs get hammered much more by speeding on the freeway or towing than an ICE does.
Hybrids don't really do anything on open freeway driving. It's the ancillary benefits. The Prius is very aerodynamic, runs skinny low rolling resistance tires. It is basically designed much like an EV where minimizing drag as extremely important. E.g., the EV6 GT-line AWD gets 260 miles of range while the EV6 GT only gets 200, numbers are slightly off as from memory but it's a huge difference mostly just from putting wider sticky tires on it. Gas car once again might see a 2 mpg drop from the big wheels and sticky tires performance gap versus a 25 percent drop in range on an EV for the reasons above.
It's all compromises. The RAV4 Prime plugin, for example, has 42 miles of electron range. It's not as efficient as either a pure BEV or even a regular hybrid though. Once you run out of the electricity from the wall outlet and are operating like a normal hybrid it's getting 38 mpg versus 40 mpg for a normal hybrid. They weight from the big battery once it's exhausted is just dead weight.
For me I'm really just waiting for closer to price parity. I can deal with the limitations on the newer EVs and if the Ioniq 5 was closer to 30k than the 58k they wanted after markups, I'd probably go for it. Good car, just not worth 58k to me. I don't know when we'll really see that. The F150 kind of made me think it was getting close but then the price shot up by 15,000 immediately similar to the fake pricing Rivian used.to inflate their IPO offering. For business reasons a manufacturer may temporarily lose money on EVs but in the longer run it's not something that is sustainable so you see those price hikes to something that more reflects costs.
Ford CEO says it costs 18k more to make a MachE than a Ford Edge. Ford only charges, without the markups, 10k more for the MachE though. They're making 8k less profit to sell you a MachE than an Edge. As expensive as it is, Ford isn't makiing much, if any, profit on the lower trims of the MachE. Eventually they'll need to. Maybe the price parity of EVs will occur but from what I'm seeing I don't really see that in the near term. Possibly by 2030 or 2035 but my take is the people who are saying it's 2023 to 2026 are off the mark.
I'm completely cool with hybrids not being promoted, particularly now where there's a shortage of them on lots. Getting a CRV or RAV4 hybrid is easier than trying to get a RAV4 Prime. Still not easy, but the unsexy nature of a plain Jane hybrid is in your favor relative to trying to buy a plugin or BEV.
In 2009, Consumer Reports tested 7 vehicles for highway mileage at 55mph, 65mph, and 75mph. On average, the cars lost about 25% of their fuel efficiency in going from 55mph to 75mph cruising. For what it's worth, the biggest losses were suffered by the hybrid in the test - nearly 30%.
The loss in fuel economy comes from the higher aerodynamic drag forces at higher speeds.
I'm waiting/hoping for better batteries; these sound promising ("high capacity, charges in “minutes rather than hours,” performs well in both hot and cold weather, and that its solid-state electrolyte is not flammable"), and would be better than current "good enough" ones.
I'm waiting/hoping for better batteries; these sound promising ("high capacity, charges in “minutes rather than hours,” performs well in both hot and cold weather, and that its solid-state electrolyte is not flammable"), and would be better than current "good enough" ones.
Thanks, that's an interesting article - IEEE Spectrum articles usually are. John Goodenough is certainly an eminent battery researcher and I like the sound of his 3rd generation solid state design. It sounds like he laid down the basic ideas for his 3rd generation design some years back and they are working out the details, and optimizing things. The guy is currently 100 years old, so no matter how brilliant he is, I doubt he has the fitness to really drive this himself in a hands-on manner at this point. If the fundamental ideas he provided are sound, lesser minds can develop things further.
P.S. Apparently Goodenough's original ideas for this glass battery were laid down by 2016, and it's now 2023. That doesn't mean it won't work of course, but development has apparently not been trivial. A statement in this 2020 article says “For the next two years we do research and development in order to prove the concept and to scale the materials”... so it looks like they ran into some difficulties, as I haven't found reports of them subsequently setting up manufacturing at scale yet.
Last edited by OutdoorLover; 03-22-2023 at 04:10 AM..
The government has picked EVs to win over other technologies. The government wants passenger and freight vehicles to use zero fossil fuels directly. That is the goal. Plug-in and conventional hybrids violate that dictate.
Toyota is a thorn in the government's side for stuboornly revealing that plug-in and conventional hybrids are far more practical than EVs in the short term.
The bad news is, early adopters are guinea pigs.
The good news is, the massive government push has cuased EV tech progress to leap far ahead of where it would be without said push, and is accelerating toward maturity. The free market would never have produced such progress toward practical EVs, as have the huge, numerous government grants and subsidies.
EVs are the future. Their win has been predetermined. Hybrids of all types are hanging on because they are still so practical, but they have been predetermined to lose, so they are short for the world.
I can safely drive a Hybrid on the highway above 70mph and not get a serious loss of range vs pure ICE or BEV.
I challenge the OP's assertion above. Hybrid cars don't do any better than ICE cars at speeds above 50, regarding a reduction in fuel economy and range as speed increases. Hybrids shine at low speeds around town, where energy is recaptured while slowing or stopping. Driving 70 mph down the interstate doesn't provide a hybrid any advantage over an ICE car. Hybrids are primarily beneficial over local city streets with lots of regulatory restrictions.
I'm really liking the new 2023 model, and strongly considering it to replace my Volt when the time comes. The base model is rated at 57 city/57 Hwy.... 52 if you upgrade to the XLE with bigger wheels.
I did not realize that EVs were heavier. Does that mean Hybrids are equally as heavy since it has both battery and a smaller ICE?
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