Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain
Discussion 345 comments
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
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.
The simples reason is this. What you’re describing is having a gas motor spin a thing (the generator) -> charge battery -> discharge battery -> spin a thing (the wheels) to make car go. Each of those steps has efficiency losses.
That’s why most hybrids are parallel hybrids, where both the gas engine and the battery+motors can spin the wheels more or less directly, even at the same time.
you still basically get the engine spinning at a more constant rpm, and the battery kicks in for acceleration (and charges on deceleration), and now highway cruising doesn’t have any lossy conversion steps, while acceleration and braking uses the advantages of the electric drive chain.
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.
They really aren't, an EREV needs two electric motors and fixed gears connecting to the engine and wheels. Toyota-style hybrids (also Ford, Chrysler, Subaru, Mazda) need... two electric motors and fixed gears connecting to the engine and wheels. Everything else is quite similar, though the hybrid will obviously have much smaller and cheaper batteries, onboard chargers, battery temperature management systems, etc.
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.
I can only speak for myself, but I do get surprise trips sometimes. My phone could ring at any time and the person on the other end will tell me that I need to go to Detroit, or Columbus, or maybe some corn field in Indiana. This is a thing that happens in my life (and I do get paid for these drives).
But I never have a surprise trip that takes more than about 2 hours. And that's... well, that's well-within EV range. I might need to spend a bit of time charging up for the return trip, but whatever: The car has a high chance of starting at ~80% charge anyway because it is plugged in while it sits in my driveway.
I do take plenty of far-longer trips, but they always have some planning. Often days worth, sometimes whole weeks worth, but always at least a few hours. I'll have plenty of time to juice the thing all the way up beforehand (if that's even useful) and also to look at the anticipated route.
And besides: While I can eek ~500 miles out of a tank of gas if I work at doing so, I never do that in one shot. I take breaks. Even when I've got a co-driver who I can swap with on a 1,200 mile jaunt, we walk around, hit the bathroom, refill on libations, and et cetera when we stop to trade spots. We make time to kill.
Since I'm already taking breaks and it's not a race, then the addition of an EV to the game only affects where I take those breaks. But, really: Those intermediate points are not a big deal -- it doesn't really matter where they happen. It just matters that they do happen.
If it is a race: If the whole point of the trip is to catch a show or a game or a ferry or some other such thing that happens at a very specific time whether I'm there or not, then I can just leave earlier. Maybe I'll get some free time to explore the area when I show up, or maybe I'll edge into a parking lot with 5% battery remaining and a growing sense of fear about getting into the venue on time, but whatever. For all 1 or 2 times per year when that's actually important and also outside of normal EV range, I can accommodate them with a grant of some extra time.
But for the every-day stuff? Man. I could do very well with an EV. I could even do very OK with an EV if I lived in apartment, as long as I could plug into a regular wall socket for a few hours while at work (which is cheaper for the boss-man to pay for than the space heater that sits under Cindy's desk).
(I guess an EV might cut off my access to certain routes in places like Wyoming or the Dakotas, but I'll worry about that ability after I gain a desire to go there to begin with.)
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)
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...
And yes the Atkinson cycle helps
>>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.
This is the real win, but it's hard to make it work in production. Eventually it will displace hybrids, but not before 2030.
[1] https://electrek.co/2026/08/20/geely-500-wh-kg-solid-state-b...
[2] https://www.intelligentliving.co/catl-500-whkg-solid-state-b...
The test is simple and tough. Heat a cut battery to 120C, and the weight must not decrease by more than 0.5%. Once the standard takes effect, only batteries passing that test can be called "solid state". Nobody has this yet outside of lab samples.
This will help avoid fake solid state battery claims such as the Donut Labs fiasco [2]
[1] https://www.intelligentliving.co/solid-state-battery-standar...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/home/electric-vehicles/donut-lab-solid-...
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).
I haven't had to use an app to deal with payment for a fast charger in years. Practically all the major networks these days have ways to pay at the dispenser with a credit card.
The last time I used an app to charge was with some chargers at my office which were free for a few hours for tenants in the building, the app was needed to add my car to my approved account and once added it auto-detected and the app wasn't needed.
My car doesn't exactly go to Europe very often, its a pretty challenging drive. So I don't get why Europe having a different plug really makes that big of a difference in the end. Would it be nice if we could just have one world plug? Sure, but not too many cars from North America are going to accidentally find themselves in Europe without much planning.
As for charging protocols and plugs in the US, I've never really had too much of an issue. For a while it was pretty much just choose a non-Tesla charger and it'll be compatible. These days in this mixed period, lots of chargers support NACS and CCS, even Tesla. I got a free adapter from Ford but outside of using it once to test it out I've never used it.
There are some level 3 chargers, but they are much less common. Maybe your city is different.
I'm not familiar with this; don't you just plug it in?
- 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.
[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".......
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.
Turbines for land uses have heat exchangers to get a lot of this back. Even after those the turbine is still lighter for a given power output and lifetime. But normal engines are a lot cheaper.
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.
It's hard to make an engine that runs at peak efficiency at a range of speeds and power demands. But when batteries are added, the picture can change quite a lot.
The engine can be built and sized to run efficiently at a fixed speed, and its power output never needs to exceed whatever the generator that it drives is able to accept.
So when it runs, the combined engine+generator set can be run full-assed. No half-assing required. It's a binary state. On, or off. Full-staff, or flaccid.
By reducing variables in this way, all of the fuel that is burned gets converted to electrical power as efficiently it can be for the process at-hand. (It's also easier to quiet an engine that runs at a fixed speed than one that runs at variable speeds; things get a lot simpler when there's only one set of identified frequencies to bother with.)
While the engine is on, some of that electrical power can get used for driving an electric motor for propulsion and the rest can go into a battery.
If it is on and the vehicle is stationary, then all of that electrical power can go into a battery while the engine is remains at full-chooch.
When the battery gets full-enough and/or demand is low-enough, then the engine can just turn completely off. In this mode, all of the electrical power used for propulsion then comes from the battery.
It works. There's even some boats[1] that use these concepts.
It's just an unusual arrangement for now. (It may always be an unusual arrangement if the goal is to eliminate localized combustion of fuel. But as we keep being reminded over and over on these pages, whenever a headline about vehicular electrification comes by: We aren't quite uniformly there yet.)
So many questions.
Two motors and e-Pedal driving is the cherry on top imho (e.g. in the 2027 Rouge).
very small, very light (under 30 pounds for a car) with massive power and torque
no stator yoke, less or no rare-earths
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.
But for my daughter, she will be off to college soon. You can't guarantee apartments will have chargers. And the school she'll mostly likely go to is close enough to drive to/from, but far enough that it would need at least 2, maybe 3, recharges for an EV. It just isn't practical.
An EV isn't right for every scenario, even if for many it is.
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).
Thinking 10 years down the road, will autonomous rentals be geo-fenced and not suitable for multi-day trips to rural places?
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
City of Hoboken, NJ. Plenty of more recent stories about Hoboken using robots, so I guess it didn't put them off.
Oh yeah, here it is: https://m.slashdot.org/story/70742
(Edited to add: that account is disputed, in some accounts the city stopped maintainers working on it without realising it wouldn't keep working)
...as one example.
I think that is a transition issue with most tech.
Like when film cameras were first transitioning to digital there was a lot of reasons you wouldn't just glom onto digital. Early digital cameras had low resolution (or files were huge), bad dynamic range, either terrible lenses or didn't work well with slr lenses, etc.
I remember when tesla came out with the first EVs the batteries had ridiculous/expensive capacity compared to other EVs (compare 90kwh to a leaf with like a leaf was 24kwh). Hybrids made sense because EV range was either poor or expensive or both. And charger infrastructure was barely getting started.
Now it is different.
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.
I think the solution is actually what we have now - high-power dc fast chargers spread around the country.
Hook it on, plug the connector up and attach your license plate to the back (or use eink).
One of the most interesting projects he did was to build a trailer from the front clip of a similar VW Rabbit, engine and transmission etc. He then used this trailer in a pusher configuration to take the electric VW Rabbit on extended trips. The engine was controlled by a hand throttle in the car. Apparently the handling was surprisingly acceptable in this configuration.
Edit - Found the link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121105135914/http://www.mrshar...
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.
I have an EV, which is amazing in my metro area, but I regularly take trips where I would not feel comfortable finding a place to charge, despite what EV locator maps might tell you. If you show up and that charger is not working, which is not uncommon, you might be stranded.
Just to be clear, that's an infrastructure problem, not a car problem. There aren't too many places you can drive in the US where you don't see a gas station at least every 50 miles, typically much more frequently. Charging stations are a completely different story.
Also Nissan has instructed Leaf owners to not use DC fast charging, as doing so can cause battery fires. A recall has been issued, but no fix is available yet.[1]
1. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2025/RCLRPT-25V655-5278.pdf
It takes all of my willpower not to go full Ted Kaczynski some days.
Despite this, I bought a cheap used 2020 Nissan Leaf and hopefully will never look back. This year it makes a huge difference but last year it would be barely a few percent cheaper than petrol. I'm a nerd and I'm happy to do some extra planning for road trips, but I don't think the average person will look at an EV like this. Range anxiety essentially limits you to ~60% of total range capacity (you're not going to sit at a service waiting absurd amounts of time to charge the last 20%, and you're not going to risk getting so low that if the next charger is faulty it will strand you).
I do agree that hybrids are nuts, and only make sense for a small demographic. I also suspect that they are a green scam as I read that most PHEV owners don't bother to actually plug them in, so the impressive ~100 MPG figures are actually worse than ICE. I'm not a car guy but even I can recognise that the hybrid engine provides absolutely zero satisfaction, especially with a CVT.
So yes, people are buying hybrids because of inflated MPG marketing, virtue signalling, whatever government benefits you get from a "green" vehicle (not much, our government isn't serious about EVs and hates anyone having a car) but most importantly the fact that every service station in the country can fuel it, in a few seconds.
If you have a specific example of a hybrid that gets worse mileage than a comparable non-hybrid ICE I'd love to hear it, because that directly contradicts my lived experience.
At various times, I've owned a 2003 Prius and a 2012 Honda Fit. The Prius was larger, had better acceleration and routinely got nearly twice the MPG of the Fit.
That was ~20 years ago; I believe newer models of Prius use different battery chemistries. On the occasions when I've driven a newer model, it got better mileage than what I experienced back then.
They also charge a lot faster now it's using a CCS connector.
There's plenty of other models providing that range too such as Renault Scenic.
I don't think hybrids are worth the extra complexity at all now. All those little moving engine parts are going to wear out sooner or later.
ps Is it bad that I still laugh at calling a place "bumfuck"?
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.
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.
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 makes a lot of sense to own and operate an EV in Texas. At my current electricity rate, the energy cost per mile for my EV is something like 4¢/mi. I just bought gas this morning, gas was $3.75/gal for me in a very cheap gas part of town in Texas (many places are closer to $4). To get that same energy cost per mile, I'd need to get ~94MPG.
Let's compare it to a car that gets like 35mpg, and say I drove a normal average US mileage of 14,000mi in a year. $560 for energy costs in the EV, let's be fair and add on the extra $200 in taxes Texas is currently adding to EVs, $760. How much did I spend on gas on that 35MPG car? 14,000mi / 35MPG = 400 gallons, * $3.75 = $1,500/yr.
Which results in more total electric miles driven replacing gas? I don't know, but "gas is destroying the world" is a brain short circuit.
They still depend on minerals that require destructive mining from equipment that runs on fossil fuels, still use rubber tires, still has tons of plastics that are made with petroleum, still dependent on a power grid mainly sustained by fossil fuels...
We should be thinking bigger than this, even. Walk, ride a bike, or take public transit whenever possible. If it's not possible, try to move somewhere where it is.
We must be willing to be slightly inconvenienced for the greater good instead of arguing about which type of car to drive. People don't want to have that conversation, though.
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 dunno. Ask the OP.
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.
> Hybrids, which combine a gas engine, electric motor, and battery, have 15 percent fewer problems on average than gas-only cars.
> EVs and PHEVs have about 80 percent more problems on average than gas-only cars.
A lot of EV/PHEV problems likely come down to them being much newer designs with issues that still need to be to work out, but hybrid vs. ICE is pretty clear. The e-CVTs, HV accessories, and simpler, less-stressed engines (no turbos which are quite common in efficiency focused ICE) enabled by hybrid drive-trains are big boons for reliability.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-s...
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.
This alone would be a deal breaker for me - get home from work and plug-in to get ready for a long drive later that evening or the next morning only to find that the charging was slow and I wasn't fully charged? No thanks.
Where I live many requested powergrid connections are put on hold permanently due to lack of capacity.