We have a name for them - Bus Drivers!

Why is all the discussion is focused on personal cars, they sit idle 90% of the time. First vehicles to go electric should be bussed, light delivery vans, taxis and all other service vehicles that are in motion over 10 hours a day, 365 days a week.

Today 95% of all electric busses are in China, because our leadership thinks that since we don't have a planned economy, no planning of any kind is needed at all.

* for an electric hybrid bus with regenerative braking, the city bus is pretty much running on batteries most of the time anyways, because it never goes above 30MPH and there's so much stopping and starting to repower the batteries.

* in practice, BEB fleets need to be bigger than their diesel equivalent fleets because of the range anxiety. In particular, BEBs and their higher weight perform worse on elevation rises, where they are spending more energy to lug the heavier weight around, and in winter. Winter is interesting, because the way current bus heating works is that they take the waste heat from the ICE and dump that inside. Electrically heating a bus takes additional energy, and on top of that batteries perform worse in cold weather. The problem is severe enough that so far the most successful cold-weather BEBs maintain a fossil fuel system just to keep the bus warm.

I'm not sure batteries will support vehicles being in motion 10 consecutive hours. And in some categories (busses, delivery bikes) it will be as lot more than 10 hours a day.

Maybe a 3 on, 1 off schedule would work (leaving it some time to charge) and that will have some capital implications (more actual vehicles in the fleet)

But I concur with the premise-work on reducing driven-miles not on "what percentage of vehicles" are electric.

The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) is buying 300 all-electric buses:

* https://www.electrive.com/2021/04/27/toronto-to-procure-300-...

They currently have 60 as part of a pilot project, in addition to a whole bunch of hybrids.

It seems to be a case of pay now, or pay later:

> Besides the infrastructure cost of chargers, each electric bus can cost $200,000 to $500,000 more per bus than an average $750,000 diesel bus.

> Case acknowledges that is "significantly" more expensive, but it is offset by fuel savings over time, as electricity costs are cheaper. Because the electric buses have fewer parts than diesel buses, maintenance costs are also about 25 per cent lower and the buses are expected to be more reliable.

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/electric-buses-transit-1.582...

Depends a lot on the exact bus system, but thinking loosely about San Francisco: maybe retrofitting ~10 terminals with swap+recharge capabilities means most routes only need 1-2 hours of juice between swaps?

King County in Seattle recently costed a transition to all-electric: the conclusion was that it would cost 41% more than sticking with the current hybrids, and would be equivalent to reducing service by 237,000 hours annually. https://seattletransitblog.com/2020/11/02/metros-fleet-all-e...

A lot of local water also comes from snowpack built over winter, which has been decreasing.

A Tesla Model 3 weights roughly as much as its ICE equivalent (BMW 3 series).

More weight to pull = more power required = more batteries required = more weight to pull. Almost a catch-22 when you factor in the increase in recharge time. For commercial vehicles, a minute of downtime is a minute of the said vehicle not making any money.

What does this mean? Do you expect a bus to weigh more than a fully loaded truck? Trucks in uk weight up to 44 tons, the largest double-decker bus is 12.

One can think of it this way also: if 85 kWh of battery modules is made, how should they be placed to reduce the most CO2.

You can put them into 8 plugin hybrid cars with 10 kWh battery in each, and it's used for commuting in each of them, replacing 80% of yearly kilometers with electric ones, that's maybe 10 x 20,000 x 0.8 = 160,000 km electric driving. Those cars still drive 10 x 20,000 x 0.2 = 40,000 km with gasoline (for long road trips etc).

Or you can put them all into one Tesla. If it's a regular private car, it drives 20,000 km per year and thus we have 20,000 km of electric driving.

So in this calculation, it would make more sense from environmental point of view to put the battery modules in hybrid cars.

Now, maybe the Tesla is a Taxi and is actually driven 100,000 km per year, then it's different.

Or maybe the luxury Teslas that sit on driveways as status symbols are changing how people think, or are driving innovation and have massive leverage that way.

But it's complicated.

Further ramping up battery production isn’t any kind of long term barrier, so plug end hybrids just result in less investment in battery manufacturing and thus slower adoption of EV’s.

Higher density LFPs are coming too.

I would agree in general with the parent, but with LFPs hitting mainstream 200-300 mile range in pure EVs, and no real resource constraint, hybrids and "standard range" can be LFP and then NMC chemistries can be dedicated to higher density needs.

30m/s to 0 on a 2000kg vehicle = 900000 J or 0.25kWh, on a at best 10kWh battery adds up.

Also LFPs don't have sourcing issues, and I think the minimum range hubrid should be 70 miles, so that would be bigger than 10kwr.

If 10kwhr is only 20-30 miles... I think we should have 25kwhr at a minimum. 20-30 miles becomes like 10 miles in deep winter, and even then the ICE is doing the heat/cooling. You need 70 miles to handle weather range degradation for that sweet 50 mile daily usage range.

Plug in hybrids can be a great option for many drivers, but IMO they they essentially inherit the downsides of both EV’s and ICE. For example they have issues sitting unused for long periods. Need to replace belts and spark plugs etc. They risk both a battery fire and gasoline fire etc etc.

Instead they never introduced it to other cars, now they have discontinued the Volt(because who wants an overpriced Chevy Cruze anyway?) and now they nothing for sale because of battery issues.

Battery issues will be resolved in the next few years as more factories come online so I don't see how a "battery hog" issue will arise unless there is a fundamental shortage of raw materials. Seems like the battery companies are also investing in recycling so this eventually becomes a closed loop system.

Look at diesel electric locomotives. They run the diesel only for power and they use the electric motors for drive. Why doesn’t this model work in cars and allow us to get rid of the transmission like a full EV does?

Gas engines have an optimal RPM. Why wouldn’t a hybrid run the engine at exactly that RPM to generate the best charge?

Instead, they are complex vehicles with EXTRA transmission like components.

The problem as I understand it is that California's regulations require that the range extender doesn't provide more range than the car's internal battery. How this ended up the case I have no idea.

Nissan e-Power system does exactly that, but requires full EV powertrain. Added cost. Also punishes transmission suppliers.

> Why wouldn’t a hybrid run the engine at exactly that RPM to generate the best charge?

Toyota THS system kind of does this. Output shaft is driven at a speed that is function of resistance and generator RPM and engine RPM thereby allowing RPM to stay in optimal-ish area.

The more I think about future drivetrains, the remarkable and more remarkable Prius starts to look for me - everyone hates hideous Toyota aesthetics and so do I, but Toyota hybrid system is rather ingenious and really something.

It's a bit like microchips.

Vast sums (think tens to hundreds of billions) have been invested into the "machine that makes the machine". Cranking out engines at this point is relatively simple.

Path dependency is a very powerful force.

Are you saying hybrids cost less than that?

The 2022 Bolt base price is $31k and it is no longer eligible for federal tax credits. In my state, EVs are partially exempt from state sales tax, but that just means the total price is something like $32k including tax (instead of $33.5k).

If Build Back Better passed, the Bolt would be eligible for a $12.5k federal credit, so I'd be looking at $19.5k. But that bill is stalled and the Bolt isn't even available to buy new right now -- GM halted manufacturing until at least February due to a battery defect.

It looks like a few states offer tax rebates of $3-5k, so that might get you close to $11k if you could get the dealer to knock a few thousand off MSRP, but I have no idea if that's realistic (and again, this assumes BBB or something similar passes).

Not only that, a subsidy that large would dramatically increase short-term demand without meaningfully increasing short-term supply. So either they would raise the price or they'll be sold out before you can buy one, e.g. because they all went to the friends and associates of the dealers.

On power-split device hybrids, the hybrid system outright replaces the automatic transmission which is the true "insanely complex" component.

My wife and I only put like 10000km per year on our car, so I generally run down the battery fully on my PHEV and just touch a bit of the gas. That would barely make a dent in a multi-hour commuter's usage.

The hard part is the short-term solutions are unpalatable: pushing back hard on oversized vehicles that are wasteful of fuel and hazardous to people who choose small, efficient, green options.

A Hummer EV uses so much battery to build you could make three Nissan Leafs... but if you didn't make the Hummer EV, the driver would stick to a monstrous huge gas-burner.

So fundamentally, fighting climate change in a world without plentiful batteries demands strong disincentive to driving oversized vehicles.

Which is, of course, politically unpalatable because destroying the earth, obstructing visibility, and threatening your fellow drivers in a hypermassive oaf of a truck is freedom.

The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. So, while on paper a PHEV solution might look better, in the real world it would result in those people just going back to regular ICE. If you outlaw ICE/make those cars unavailable, you'll find plenty of political headwinds and set the entire movement back a decade IMO.

How many people take their cars to race tracks to be able to tell the difference in performance? If it can get to 70 mph in some reasonable time, which almost any production car can, then what more is there to ask for on a public road?

Is it necessary? No, obviously, people aren’t dying left and right trying to merge in Priuses. It is very noticeable, however.

It makes very little sense from my perspective. What am I going to do, cut someone off? Floor it and merge with no consideration for the trajectories of other vehicles?

It’s not that difficult, and I live in an area with notoriously short on-ramps. You’ve still got plenty of road to match the speed of the cars on the highway and shift your position so you land between two cars. Accelerating as you’re about to merge just makes that more difficult, especially with a short on-ramp.

Yeah, sometimes people don’t know how to drive and stop or slow down on on-ramps. I don’t care how fast my car can accelerate; if the person in front of me isn’t reaching the same speed as the cars on the highway, I’m going to stop much farther back on the ramp, wait for them to do their thing, and resume proper merging once they’re out of the way. I don’t want to have to deal with flooring it and trying to time everything while accelerating.

While we can construct edge scenarios where a fast car can get you out of trouble (mostly when overtaking) I'm willing to bet that's a marginal effect that is trumped by the inherent danger of very powerful cars in the hands of inexperienced drivers - i.e 100% of the first time buyers who never drove one.

Seems more like a rationalisation for wanting a cool toy, "don't worry honey, those 500HP will mean the world when merging to drop the kids to school".

"I can't drive anything that does less then 3s 0-60s because <insert some flimsy reason>". If you want a fast car, just come out and say it. Driving a high performance car can be exhilarating - I have a second/weekend fast car for precisely the reason that I enjoy it, but I don't pretend it is required or that it is particularly responsible or socially acceptable to boot it away from the lights or go accelerate like shit off of a stick when merging with faster traffic. My hybrid does 99% of my driving, and the other is strictly a weekend guilty pleasure. I've never been in a situation in normal driving where the hybrid couldn't do something my weekend car would have handled (apart from just blow someone off at the lights if they have pissed me off)

The arguments here against PHEVs and EVs etc used to be towing speed boats up mountains every week (it was never made clear why people were taking speed boats up a mountain so frequently! Surely there is not much water up a mountain...)

I guess people need new arguments now that range and towing and charging are solved issues for 99% of people's needs.

I am sure someone will now reply about their journey out to meet their parents in the country with no chargers on the journey there etc etc... Did you try driving your speedboat there instead? :)

It’s the kind of thread that makes me really wish people on the internet would read what’s written, not what they’d like to think was written.

If you want these people to replace their 5s cars with hybrids you need to offer 5s hybrids.

These are readily available.

Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but bad traffic here means stationary or less than walking speed. There is no need for hot rod acceleration in these situations!

Merging is slow; I ended up flooring it and only reaching ~50 mph by the end of the onramp. Bay area ramps are, however, very short. Try the SB 101 Rengstorff ramp in Mountain View, it's horrible. In fact, that very ramp is why I replaced my 2002 Saturn LW200 with a 2010 BMW 135i in 2012.

The Prius also can't maintain speed up hills. I would engage cruise control and find myself dramatically slowing down on any uphill segment. By contrast none of my cars have this problem - the 2010 BMW 135i, the 2022 Chevrolet Bolt, and the 2000 Chevrolet Silverado all do just fine. Of the three, the Bolt is my favorite to drive.

That is, of course, not an indictment of PHEVs in general, just the Prius in particular. It's under-powered for unremarkable basic driving. Hopefully the Prime and other models newer than what I drove are better.

I have an auris which is mechanically identical to a Prius. I have not driven those exact roads but I have never struggled going up hills and it will hit 60mph from a standstill in just under 10s, so with a rolling start of say 20-30 getting onto the onramp you are at 60 or so in 6 or 7 seconds. If your onramps are so short that you can't drive for 6 or 7 seconds before merging, then I guess that is a different problem.

There is nothing in hybrid configuration that makes a car slow, if not faster, not just Tesla quickening but actually overall faster. It's definitely Prius product design problem that is creating an impression that hybrids are slow ugly cars.

6s to 62mph is pretty nippy - if you need faster than 6s 0-62mph then you are likely in a fairly small niche group.

Looks like the base Tesla 3 is 0-62 in 5.8s and 140mph top speed so pretty comparable.

The Benz starts at $54k in the US, that’s definitely model 3 performance territory.

Base Tesla 3 and base 300e appear to be mostly the same price and mostly same 0-62 performance at 5.8s and 6.1s.

You’re looking at a PHEV that no longer exists.

The Chevy Volt was pretty sporty (damn the suits who killed it), and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI-DUULV1tE

>The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes

Well there's your problem. The fact that EVs are toys is making you think PHEVs are also toys. There are PHEVs currently on the market that can compete with the Ford Focus and the Honda Accord.

I was terribly impressed; my car would've had to put more work in to do that.

That's not a "joke."

Tesla is at the other side of spectrum when it comes to it, so they just put what they make because they can. They managed to set the benchmark for BEV so others follow them for BEV products.

There have been studies on how PHEVs are used in the real world and this is just not what's happening, see e.g.: https://theicct.org/publications/phev-real-world-usage-sept2...

Not a majority, but 37% of your driving on electric is a significant chunk. Would

And to take a Prius Prime for an example, you can still have a very efficient vehicle when you're running in normal hybrid mode:

> C/D observed 75-mph highway driving (hybrid mode): 47 mpg / 49 mpg / 47 mpg

If you're trying to make the most difference with limited battery production, that's 8.8 kWh of batteries for a Prius Prime. You can make more than 6 of them with the batteries that go into a single "low range" Model 3 (54 kWh).

Six cars doing a bit over 1/3 of their miles in electric mode, or one car doing all of its miles in electric mode?

That's a relatively short electric range car, if 25 miles isn't doing enough for most people there's probably a good middle ground where you use half the batteries of a long range EV but cover 90% of your milage in EV mode.

This is of course ignoring that the Model 3 is a lot more fun to drive than a Prius Prime, but just to make the point about battery usage.

Could work as more and more stuff becomes electric in cars instead of running off accessory belt.

>. Most PHEVs have type-approval all-electric ranges of 30–60 km and electrify 5,000–10,000 km a year. PHEVs with high all-electric ranges of 80 km or more achieve 12,000–20,000 km mean annual electric mileages, which is comparable to the annual mileage of the car fleet in Germany and the United States.

Yes, but this exists now, with the government handouts and tax credits. They overwhelmingly go to affluent people who need these things the least.

There are unsexy trades like replacing oil burning heaters for gas or wood pellet stoves but these often aren't viewed as green enough and the people who would benefit have no one advocating for them.

This is Tesla’s business model and a huge reason Li batteries are so much less expensive today.

I’d say the inverted logic is more like buy electric cars now even though they don’t hold their resale value due to economies of scale catching up on you.

Adding social punishments here would hurt momentum. It is far better to reward imperfect progress than to create a social environment where people feel like they'll never be good enough.

Also that seems what Toyota is thinking with their anti-BEV lobbyism.

Even so, I get about 40MPG, so much better than an average vehicle.

It does sting to maintain an engine for 800 miles a year.

Pretty soon I'm going to be out of warranty and I'm going to stretch the oil change interval a bit beyond what they suggest-- 16 mos instead of a year. It just feels wasteful.

I already view them as battery hogs. It baffles me that anyone thinks they make sense. We have the battery supply to either make a small minority of cars EVs or to make all cars PHEVs.

PHEVs are cheaper, more practical, and more environmentally sound.

They are basically shitty electric cars and a shitty fossil cars combined.

You get all of that with Graphene. It’s just a question of cost. I’m honestly shocked that they haven’t put them in the top end Tesla’s yet to showcase the technology.