I am not fully sold on a electric vehicle, Isn’t hybrid a better option if you live in Scandinavia for example?
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Hybrids were a nice stepping stone before modern EV tech, but I think they're fundamentally flawed.
They're constantly carrying around the weight AND space of both the EV (battery, internal charger, etc) and the ICE (gas, transmission, engine, etc).
This means that using either is quite inefficient in terms of total energy used to travel a distance, and neither can be very good. (Limited battery range, weaker engine)
They also have to deal with the wear and maintenance of both systems.
I would rather just have one or the other.
https://blog.wallbox.com/how-norway-became-a-global-ev-leade... (Lessons From Norway’s Journey To Becoming The Global Leader In EV Adoption)
https://electrek.co/2021/09/23/norway-bans-gas-cars-in-2025-... (Norway bans gas car sales in 2025, but trends point toward 100% EV sales as early as April 2022)
https://time.com/6133180/norway-electric-vehicles/ (What Norway Can Teach the World About Switching to Electric Vehicles)
(Hybrids are counted in Norway’s electric vehicle stats, but are less than 10% of new vehicle sales)
On one axis a plug-in hybrid is just objectively better than both ICE cars and EVs, it can use two sources of energy instead of one. But it comes with a bunch of other tradeoffs (which I don't know much about).
EVs work pretty OK in Norway. Some observations is that most/many choose to install a charger at home (or in the parking underneath their apartment), so the car starts every day fully charged. Another is that the grid is so built out that there is electricity "everywhere". Not necessarily enough for a super charger, but there is something. Most cabins have electricity for example. My hypothesis is that there are much fewer meters of road which is more than a kilometer from a source of electric power (at least in the south where most people live) in Norway compared to the US or Canada (relative to size).
I grew up where we would have a massive hurricane every few years that would knock out power for 2 weeks at a time minimum. I would never want an electric vehicle in this situation because you'd be completely stranded in an emergency. We'd keep ~100 gallons of gasoline in a caddy for generators and cars to use during these outages and it was ideal.
I'd pay a premium for a Plug-in Hybrid especially if I can use the motor as a generator for my house.
> we keep ... gasoline ... for generators
Well, can't you charge your EV with a generator ?
Picked a random generator off home depot: https://www.homedepot.com/p/DEWALT-8000-Watt-Electric-Start-...
11 hours runtime at 4kW == 44kWh capacity. 44/7.5 gallon tank == 5.8 kWh per gallon. Lets say your EV has average efficiency of 3.5 miles per kWh, so that’s about 20 mpg off the generator. Apply a 13% efficiency loss while charging (https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a36062942/evs-explaine...) and it reduces to 18mpg. Better than a lot of cars still on the road.
In a crisis, an ev is probably a pretty big waste of a generator, you need to keep your fridge and freezer on for literally as long as possible.
Yep, freezer and fridge get the power and the car is mostly used to get more gasoline and pickup water from the national guard.
Wouldn't a decent ev be able to keep a fridge and freezer going for weeks and have plenty left for short trips?
I thought the ev issue was for those who wish to evacuate long distances without having to recharge to reach the destination.
That's a fair point however if you needed to go anywhere to fetch supplies anyone left at home wouldn't have power until you return. Gasoline just stores so much more energy than modern batteries and it can be pumped from the station without power I think it's more durable in an emergency.
Say you had to live in Kyiv for whatever reason right now. With the rolling outages would you rather have a plug-in hybrid or an EV?
If I'm just bopping around town, my EV seems to keep a charge for a remarkably long time. Regenerative braking is quite remarkable while idling consumes quite a bit of gasoline. The EV might be able to hold its charge completely through the disaster if you're only going out locally to get water, food and gas.
Newer cars with auto-stop engines might make the comparison a lot farier for the ICE, though.
Why can't you just replace the gas with batteries or use it in a generator?
Norway is already at ~80% EVs for new car sales. There are gas stations that are ripping up their pumps for fast chargers.
> Norway is already at ~80% EVs for new car sales. There are gas stations that are ripping up their pumps for fast chargers.
What do you do about the snow plows, garbage trucks, ambulances, police cars, buses, etc....vehicles that are currently being used for several hours a day and can't have any downtime??
Speciality vehicles will probably be the last ones to be electrified. I've not yet seen an electric snow plow, or even an ambulance.
The city busses charge over night, and some (I believe) in the lull between morning and evening rush hours. High traffic routes can charge while running(!) using overhead wires (city used to have old trolley buses). See [1]. They'll connect and disconnect to the wired infrastructure on parts of their route. At 3:14 in [1] you'll see the moment of disconnect. At 4:20 it reconnects. These busses can run continuously.
Taxis in the city are 50/50 electric and hybrid (prius) I would guess, just based on what I see on the streets. By law they have to all be electric by october 2025 in this county. Taxis have fast chargers next to their stands.
There are electric excavators and the like for inner city construction. Apparently some can run for up to 6h using only onboard battery. They usually drop some huge containers with charge ports near the work sites, which I assume extend this run time (+slow charge from the grid). You often see them connected with huge cables to these containers during static work.
Garbage trucks where I live are a mix of diesel and electrics. Majority is still diesel. Afaik the electrics run for a full shift. They're trying hard to get rid of garbage trucks where possible though, using underground pipes. You swipe an RFID at a "terminal", it opens, you dump in your garbage, vacuum pulls it to the incinerator facility, it gets burned, water gets heated, and then pushed back to homes as district heating. Obviously won't work for suburbia or rural communities.
In New Zealand, during the first quarter of next year, they're putting in 4 new petrol stations in my city alone, FWIW.
Maybe they'll silently drop something like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TVohXHjLro
That’s some pretty poor investment decision making.
I am not sold on Battery EV, however Hybrid seems to be the worst parts of ICE and BEV combined to make terrible vehicles that have extreme long term maintenance costs, and liabilities as you now have both an expensive battery and expensive engine either one fail and the car is totaled
I would invest in oil companies if I were you. There are certainly going to be bottlenecks during the switchover since network capacity can't be increased sufficiently fast enough to accommodate all those BEV's.
The switchover is, however, unstoppable. Even though no one has asked themselves if this will save the environment (it won't). I've roughly calculated that we can half our oil usage if we all switch over to electric vehicles. But that's far from what's needed to save the world from climate change.
I also predict that BEV's will eventually be a lot cheaper than ICE cars. This will in itself have profound consequences since more people will want to use the road network and congestion is already a problem today.
It doesn’t matter if you’re sold or not, in a few years you won’t have the choice.