Stanton said:
goldbrick said:
My commute is only 9 miles and shopping, etc is less but I spend a lot of mental wear and tear to keep track of the SOC.
Exactly! This is one of the reasons I don't like hybrids. If someone is trying to "save gas/$" by buying a hybrid, then you can't tell me that they are not going to be obsessive about when the ICE kicks in.
Not everyone is obsessive about burning a bit of gas: those who are should probably get a ZEV, if they can. My friend's leased 3 PHEVs, two Ford Fusion Energies (19 and 22 mile AER IIRR) and currently a BMW X5 xDrive 45e (31 mile AER). All of them have handled his routine local driving just fine, and he simply doesn't worry if he occasionally needs to use the ICE for slightly longer trips. When his current lease expires next year he's looking to get a BEV, as there are now enough choices to meet his needs. As he only takes weekend trips by car (any further and he flies and rents), current BEVs can meet his needs given the places he drives, which have charging facilities available enroute or at the destination.
There will always be a market for people who need a PHEV with 'just a bit more' AER, the question is whether a government needs to mandate that range, or instead just mandate enough to handle the typical daily usage and let the people who need more buy cars to suit (assuming the market's big enough for manufacturers to bother).
As PHEVs with fossil-fueled ICEs are a transition tech which will fade out over the next 15 years or so as batteries, fuel cells, syn/bio-fuels or what have you improve in cost and capability, I think it's counter-productive to set the fossil-fuel ICE PHEV AER bar too high, raising the price (as well as the weight and the volume taken up by the pack) of these cars. Mass adoption requires mass market prices, and that means below $30k base MSRP + dest., preferably a lot below. Big PHEV packs work against that. I always thought the i3 Rex (originally 72, later 84? mile AER plus ~ 1 hour of range on the ICE) was pretty dumb, as it had a very limited market and was far too expensive owing to its large pack PLUS an (underpowered) ICE that required premium gas. [
Edit: I see that the 2021 with an even larger 42.4 kWh vice the original 22 kWh pack claimed a max. range of 153 miles at a base MSRP + dest. of $45,445, with the 643cc gas engine and small 2.4 gal. tank adding just 47 miles of range for a max. of 200 on the now much heavier base car, and costing $3,850 more. IMO this is idiotic - who's the intended market for a car with such specs, when you could buy a cheaper BEV with greater range, or a shorter AER PHEV with four hours or more of driving range on the ICE for $15-$20k less?]
When they put the new cells in I thought that rather than increase the AER they should retain the existing AER or even reduce it, and use the space saved to increase the size of the fuel tank to hold at least 2 or better 4 hours of gas and boost the power output of the ICE, making it far more practical as an all-around car. As that would likely have required a whole new round of crash testing that probably made no economic sense to BMW, given the limited market. OTOH, given that it only cost about $5k [or less. See above] more than the i3 BEV while offering more than twice the utility, it still provided much more bang for the buck than the latter.
For more discussion of what's a good range for PHEVs, what's wrong with current PHEV incentives and how you might fix them, see:
https://evadoption.com/phevs-are-a-great-solution-for-many-but-phev-incentives-need-fixing/
Seeing as how I've raised many of the same points in the past and Mr. McDonald (whose posts I just recently found) and I seem to have similar philosophies, it's no surprise I'm in near 100% agreement with him.