Personally, my next vehicle will be a plug-in hybrid, likely a used Prius.
For all the benefits of EVs, they are a hassle today and will likely continue to be a hassle for the lifetime of a vehicle purchased today.
My current vehicle, a four door sedan, averages approximately 6 l / 100 km. Pretty good but that is largely because it is light.
IMHO, there's a huge part of the hybrid / dual drivetrain story that EV advocates miss - eliminating most (but not all) fuel emissions is a very good start and is certainly better than the status quo. Hybrids also come with the benefits of both fuels, an advantage that is often ignored.
A 2023 Prius prime has about 60 km of electric range. This is well above the average commute length in Canada.
What benefits do you see hybrids having over EVs? Is it just range anxiety? If so, check out how quickly some of the 800V architecture cars can change. I think the Kia EV6 can charge from 10-90% in 18 minutes, and that's for almost 300 miles of range.
I don't know about you, but if I charged every time I stopped to pee (and buy a seltzer, predicting the next stop) I'd never have to have a dedicated charge stop.
And the hoopla about winter driving range is pretty much moot if you have one with a heat pump.
A PHEV isn't a straight upgrade from a HEV, the extra weight from the batteries typically means once your out of your small electric only range, you get worse MPG than the HEV
At least for me, it's not just charging time for longer distance driving, it's charger availability. Driving a gas car, I can be pretty confident that as long as I'm not driving through Death Valley, I will be able to easily find numerous places where I just need a credit card and I can fill up.
Electric chargers on the other hand are a festival of incompatibility, unreliability, unexpectedly slow charging, broken chargers, mandatory terrible apps, lack of availability off major roads, etc. Now every trip is like driving a gas car through the middle of rural Australia, where you have to carefully plan your stops and hope nothing goes wrong.
Now I admit all that is getting better, but the experience is still worse than taking a road trip in a gas car. And most importantly, it's something people feel less comfortable relying on. If the only difference was time to fill up, I don't think it would be an issue for a lot of people.
Battery anxiety is real, at least here in Montana. I don't have my supercharger adapter yet (been 6 months, probably be another 6 months at this rate), and the only chargers that were available to me on my last trip were the Level 1 chargers. I made it back home (day trip) with about 14% battery, but the speed at which the battery was falling made me exceptionally anxious.
My EV remains a local "for fun" vehicle for the foreseeable future.
An interesting one for me is that living in Texas, there is a punitive tax on registration for EVs, but not plug-in hybrids. It's not terribly significant, but it is worth mentioning. Otherwise, range anxiety is still a factor.
Thats 2.5l/100km (40km/liter) for us metric luddites.
Thats indeed very very impressive!
The article does not mention, but I wonder what the average speed was over the whole distance. Extreme mileage is pretty useless if you are going at a snail's pace.
Not a snail's pace, but sub-highway-speed for sure. As you get very slow internal resistance and continuous power draw start to dominate. Peak efficiency in a Model Y is somewhere around 40-45mph.
I regularly get 56+ mpg out of a stock non-hybrid diesel 2015 Ford Focus with a 1499cc engine (and it has a turbo on it). It's not hard, it's just conscientious driving: gentler acceleration, coasting to lights a little more, driving at optimal speeds rather than the fastest speeds the speed limit allows, using cruise control when you can (it'll coast more than you do on gentle declines when able), using speed limiters when you can't.
I feel like if I had time in my life for a new hobby, hyper-mile driving like this could be it. :)
I've driven between Boston and Montreal in a 2018 Prius Prime and got something like 60 mpg despite a large part of the trip being through the mountains of Vermont. Hybrids are a fantastic technology that, in a rational world, should have completely taken over the mainstream car market 15 years ago. Momentum seems to be slowly going towards PHEVs, which actually benefit even more from ubiquitous charging infrastructure than long-range BEVs. Unfortunately having owned a PHEV for the last 5 years, charger availability does not feel like has expanded at all, despite there being 10x as many EVs on the roads as 5 years ago. So if you can even find a charger, it is probably occupied.
So I suppose route planning is mainly about trying to find long stretches of back roads without too many intersections? I even wonder if you need a car ahead to report on stoplight timing, so you can accelerate or decelerate slightly to avoid stopping. Or to tell you when it's safe to barrel through stop signs, that nobody is coming in the other direction.
I wish there were more details about the strategy/techniques he used. This reminds me of reading up on Cannonball runs [0] (racing coast-to-coast as fast as possible). Though this is a lot more pro-social!
> on an exploratory drive averaging 68.1 mph prior to the record attempt, Geddes managed 58.1 mpg. No bullshit, no tricks, no crazy descents, just ridiculously good fuel economy.
This is not surprising to those of us who drive Priuses
Readit News
For all the benefits of EVs, they are a hassle today and will likely continue to be a hassle for the lifetime of a vehicle purchased today.
My current vehicle, a four door sedan, averages approximately 6 l / 100 km. Pretty good but that is largely because it is light.
IMHO, there's a huge part of the hybrid / dual drivetrain story that EV advocates miss - eliminating most (but not all) fuel emissions is a very good start and is certainly better than the status quo. Hybrids also come with the benefits of both fuels, an advantage that is often ignored.
A 2023 Prius prime has about 60 km of electric range. This is well above the average commute length in Canada.
I don't know about you, but if I charged every time I stopped to pee (and buy a seltzer, predicting the next stop) I'd never have to have a dedicated charge stop.
And the hoopla about winter driving range is pretty much moot if you have one with a heat pump.
A PHEV isn't a straight upgrade from a HEV, the extra weight from the batteries typically means once your out of your small electric only range, you get worse MPG than the HEV
Electric chargers on the other hand are a festival of incompatibility, unreliability, unexpectedly slow charging, broken chargers, mandatory terrible apps, lack of availability off major roads, etc. Now every trip is like driving a gas car through the middle of rural Australia, where you have to carefully plan your stops and hope nothing goes wrong.
Now I admit all that is getting better, but the experience is still worse than taking a road trip in a gas car. And most importantly, it's something people feel less comfortable relying on. If the only difference was time to fill up, I don't think it would be an issue for a lot of people.
My EV remains a local "for fun" vehicle for the foreseeable future.
How's the battery health after 15 years ?
Deleted Comment
Thats indeed very very impressive!
The article does not mention, but I wonder what the average speed was over the whole distance. Extreme mileage is pretty useless if you are going at a snail's pace.
~70kph is the optimal speed for regular gas cars, for EVs it's even lower apparently
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Radu-Tarulescu/publicat...
https://www.polestar-forum.com/attachments/img_5724-jpg.1268...
They managed to beat 25 year old Euro car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Lupo#Lupo_3L
I feel like if I had time in my life for a new hobby, hyper-mile driving like this could be it. :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/prius/s/klltPluFdZ
So I suppose route planning is mainly about trying to find long stretches of back roads without too many intersections? I even wonder if you need a car ahead to report on stoplight timing, so you can accelerate or decelerate slightly to avoid stopping. Or to tell you when it's safe to barrel through stop signs, that nobody is coming in the other direction.
(1 mile / 60 mpg)/(2 miles / 90 mpg) = 0.75
Traveling 1 mile @ 60 mpg consumes 75% of the fuel as going 2 miles @ 90 mpg does.
Edit: *Assuming the route planning grand-OP mentioned to optimize for mpg goes significantly out of the way.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/10/coast-to-coast-in-under...
This is not surprising to those of us who drive Priuses