The reason is because hybrid drive trains don't make sense, as evs get cheaper. I suppose there is less demand. I was hoping for a car with 100 miles ev range and 250 more miles gas range. Then you get a lot of weight from two drive trains and the batteries.
Because the engine isn’t the only thing being optimized. Suppose your options are 50 miles of effective plug in range and a 40% efficient engine or a 35% efficient engine and a 100 miles of plug in range. The second option might use a lot less gas.
It’s not just the cost of batteries that’s a concern resulting in short plug in hybrid ranges. Weight is a real limiting factor when you also need a gas engine and large fuel tank.
It's always struck me as weird that they aren't producing hybrids in the vehicles that can most benefit from them: vans, pickups, trucks and tractors.
All of these are vehicles with a focus on power and range that would benefit from the torque and simplicity of electric motors, and could easily absorb the weight penalty of a motor-generator and fuel versus more batteries. The people who buy these for functional reasons would appreciate the long range, easy refueling, and reduced maintenance costs.
Yeah, this is what I don't understand, but maybe it's because my wife and I are a one car and mostly public transit oriented family.
What I want: A hybrid electric with ~40 miles of battery and a 300mi gas tank for longer trips
What Auto Manufacturers assume (I'm guessing): 2 car households where one is 100% electric and the other 100% gas.
Seems to me like the plug in hybrid is the best of all worlds. Everyone can use battery for all the short trips we do and we don't make any compromises for our long distance needs.
Hybrid and electric drive trains allow heavier vehicles to be more efficient. For example a hybrid RAV4 uses less fuel than a regular RAV4 even though it weighs more.
The extra weight of a battery and electric drive train means at least part of the fuel efficiency is compensated, hybrids typically weigh 200 Kg more than their ICE counterparts.
There's another measure that would have saved everyone a lot of money and emissions: better aerodynamics. Car makers have been building terrible designs for decades because gasoline was cheap, but we know they could do much better. A car with good aerodynamics (like the Prius by the way, or the Hyundai Ioniq) saves enough fuel to not need a hybrid drive train.
Hybrids doesn't make sense to me. If you need a car that runs on gas then make it a proper ICE car. Why put two engines into one? Seems super wasteful.
A plug-in hybrid works differently. It has an engine as well as electric motors, a gearbox to make that all work together, a diff, etc.
A range extended EV doesn't have a gearbox or a diff. Just a generator attached to the battery. So they drop all that complexity and weight.
I always thought they were a brilliant design in that sense, as far back as 2010ish when the Chevy Volt was announced. I'm surprised they haven't caught on more vs hybrids.
I thought the same thing. But back when it was introduced, batteries were really expensive.
Now, a battery pack for a ~250 mile electric car would cost ~6k. That still isn't ideal for long distances, but it would make a fantastic commuter car and an occasional long distance trip would only become inconvenient, not impossible.
Effectively it covers the same space and the cost increase to make a serial hybrid (like the Volt) is no longer economic.
It is a strategy that is subject to being superceded very soon.
Reliability is just one part of the problems with hybrids. Efficiency and cost are also less than optimal.
A dual power train just costs more --- both initially and in terms of maintenance. There is no way around this. It is also a drag on efficiency --- for both long and short trips.
On short trips, the electric power train has to drag around the ICE components. On a long trip, the ICE has to drag around the electric components.
This strategy leaves the competition with a clear path to produce a lighter, more efficient, less expensive alternative.
Any sort of battery breakthrough will kill this hybrid strategy. Rather than promoting or leading this breakthrough, Toyota is effectively betting against it --- primarily for cultural reasons rather than technological ones in my opinion.
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.
>Hybrids are strictly worse than electrics in every measure except range, and most customers do not need the range they claim to need.
Thats the benefit of a plug-in Hybrid. Most people don't need to drive much on a day to day basis and the smaller battery can handle that fine. For longer driving you have the ICE engine. The ICE engine can weigh as much or less than a comparatively "long range" battery.
I don't think you're giving it quite enough credit. For a hybrid car what you can do is marry this to a more powerful electric motor (say, 40HP). When the car is cruising at a constant speed it's running on the engine and charging the batteries (or using just the batteries with the motor off). When the car is accelerating a lot it's using the batteries/motor and the engine at the same time (generating say 70HP or more). Given the lower weight and higher efficiency of this engine that's pretty significant. If it's possible to create a hybrid drive-train (including batteries) that weighs only as much or only a little more than a pure gasoline drive-train that could translate into much cheaper hybrid vehicles on the market.
P.S. For clarity's sake, modern hybrids are enormous compromises due to the weight of the battery and electric motor. For a hybrid you want the highest efficiency possible and thus the lowest total vehicle weight you can manage without compromise safety. The necessity of heavy batteries fights in the opposite direction, so in order to produce a fuel efficient vehicle car makers use more expensive, lighter weight materials in the construction of the vehicle. This increases the complexity of manufacturing (more different materials are being used) and raises the price of the vehicle. If you could drop in a drive-train which kept the weight the same that would change the industry dramatically.
It's about getting more people using EV more often, and efficiently using the limited resources required for EVs.
Please go read about Toyota's strategy. If you have enough Lithium for 1000 EV batteries, or 10,000 hybrid batteries, it seems pretty easy to see how it is better for everyone, especially given average trip distance.
Not sure why hybrids don't make sense to you, have you done the research to consider all aspects of the change, or are you focused on a specific factor like reliability or wastefulness of the parts used? Don't you think it's wasteful to put a massive battery in a car to give it a long range that will be rarely used in most trips?
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