I can imagine that for many people this is unfortunately probably very true, but it would also be extremely dependent on the individual and their driving habits. I drive my Chevy Volt 95% of the time on just the battery, which in my state is being charged with >80% Hydroelectric power. I just have to add about 8 gallons of gas to the car every ~3 months, usually after driving someone to the airport or something.
I'm German. My grandpa was an electrical engineer. He is very enthusiastic about his PHEV and talks about it alot. He bought one because not only is he interested, but also PHEV sales got heavily subsidized (i think like 6000€ or smth) and so many people bought one in his area as well. Apparently, a surprising amount of old middle class German people bought PHEVs and literally never charge it. My grandpa told me he onced asked his neighbor for a cable and that thing was brand new.
I'm not sure if its ignorance or deliberate though. If you never use the battery the resale value might be higher? It's also literally just an anecdote but it was surprising
Not plugging it in does not mean the battery is not used, it just means that the battery is always charged by the gasoline engine in the car, rather than from the electric grid
Plus. It will be even worse for the battery as it will always be close to zero (at least in vw group 1.4 phev)
I own one and like it though. But I charge daily (from solar when the weather allows so) and it is sufficient for my commutes so th engine only starts in long trips.
That makes sense! I'd still assume thats way less then ideal on fuel usage. Again anecdotal but my gramps is charging his on a regular wall plug. Takes long but gets the job done. And if not you still get to drive anyway, you're never stuck.
After working in tech (and providing tech support and tutoring), this seems like a typical non-tech-savvy user behavior: Just do what is familiar.
So they got a good deal on a car. It's a car and it drives, and you fill it with gas. It already works, the effort to learn and use the car for more potential is (probably) not worth it to the owner.
You could see the same pattern with people who use office applications on a daily basis but don't bother learning functionality (or even shortcuts).
Yet I am not trying to push the "users are dumb" stereotype, because everyone has their own blind spots in knowledge.
I find the EV only range of those PHEV abysmal, at 60km in the summer with this Mercedes PHEV we have (and 30km in the winter), it hardly covers commute. If they at least remade the balance to have at least 100km in winter for range, that the % of EV only driving would skyrocket.
As a Finn, the most annoying aspect here is the unequal treatment by the government. A PHEV is treated very favourably tax wise, and the emissions calculations are very optimistic about the usage of electric power.
My car is a compressed natural gas car that I drive with 100 % biogas, which is domestic made from waste and other side products of industry, and has an estimated CO2 equivalent emission of ~0 g/km. The tax law and emissions calculations assume that I drive it on natural gas all of the time, never a single kilometer using biogas. Additionally I need to pay an extra fixed tax (not based on kilometers driven) just because it's a CNG car. This tax is 6 times higher than for PHEVs.
Thus, a big SUV like Mitsubishi Outlander, which eats a lot of petrol as soon as you get outside the short EV range and runs its engine anyway when it's cold in the winter, gets to pay less tax (which is specifically based on CO2 emissions) than my biogas car.
PHEVs in my eyes are nothing but greenwashing for most people.
Natural gas and biogas, are they both CH4? I heard they could be way worse than CO2 and leak might be inevitable to distribute them around the country and pumped into cars from time to time? Are there scientific evaluation on the impact?
It's the same stuff. I'm not sure how much of it leaks, but you have to either flare it or use it for something or it leaks anyway. Using it for cars and trucks is basically flaring it but using that energy for propulsion.
The taxes are not based on that, though. They're strictly interested in tailpipe emissions (not even lifecycle emissions), and don't recognise biogas at all.
I'm planning on switching to a BEV eventually, but right now it's not financially possible. Most of the time I commute on my bicycle anyway.
I have a BMW PHEV, so much depends on your use cycle and whether or not you charge it. I have cheap electricity from 12:30am to 4:30am for charging every night. If I just do the school run and a trip to the shops in it I would never need petrol. But in the winter I can't get to the office and back on electricity only which is a shame. If I never charge it it works as a normal hybrid and I get low 40's UK MPG, which is still decent for a 225hp 4wd car.
If you don't charge it from mains you can still self charge and choose where to use the electric power - i.e. siwtch it to charge on the motorway then switch to EV mode around town for a nicer drive and more overall efficiency. Most people would not bother doing that though.
"these vehicles are currently not realizing their potential, largely because they are not being charged and driven fully electrically as frequently as assumed"
That's crazy to me, gasoline is so much more expensive than electricity, why wouldn't people charge the batteries more often?
At least in Germany a lot of them are company cars. As in a car used by one specific employee for official and private uses alike, but paid by the company as part of the compensation. The employee might not have had a say in choosing a PHEV and might not be paying for the gasoline either.
there are also companies that give you a card to pay for refuelling your car, but to charge it you would have to pay yourself - guess what people do...
>That's crazy to me, gasoline is so much more expensive than electricity, why wouldn't people charge the batteries more often?
Of course any sane person would want to charge their car electrically. So I can only imagine that the inability to do so is the problem.
My guess would be because many people can't. In most European cities having a dedicated place to charge your car is not affordable to most people. Which is one reason manufacturers targeted their BEVs at the higher end, the population who has a garage and can install a charger there.
To me that's a really weird analogy. Nobody would think about putting a gasoline tank and pump in their garage ... There's plenty of public charging infrastructure in Europe. Fast charging on the highways, slow charging in living areas. Even many supermarkets offer fast chargers now, so that during your grocery shopping trip you can get most of your charging needs covered. There's plenty of opportunities to charge your vehicle over night, or really quickly when needed. It's absolutely possible to own an EV without a garage
Nope, not even in Switzerland its good enough and covered enough. Maybe for some folks, but not good enough for others.
What I see is how rich folks buying these (since these have TCO cost 2-4x as much as buying a solid used car every 10 years and servicing that with a good non-brand service, ie good BMWs are great at this) end up being proverbial slaves to their cars. Effin' car, like we are not enslaved with enough gizmos. Additional mental calculations compared to owning ICE cars re range if your commute is in tens of kms and not merely kms, forced to do stops on longer routes as car needs, not as the people riding it need.
I see it as adding tons complexity into our lives, and we are working hard on opposite direction.
Here (Slovenia) that is a lot of hassle for no personal benefit. Public charging is expensive enough that you'll never recuperate the higher price of the vehicle (if you can't charge at home).
You leave your car parked outside at a slow 22kW charger. But with a full BEV, you don't need to charge every night, just like you don't need to fill up your gasoline car every evening in your own garage.
There are only parking space with charging available for 2 cars in a 4km radius in my neighborhood. Charging that is anyway nit cost effective.
YMMV but afaik in europe there are still plenty of places where using an EV wouldn't be practical at all, even in urban area.
The only EV that I am considering is the Silence S01 moped and the reason is that its battery can be unmounted and be carried around as a trolley luggage so I could charge it inside my building.
>There are only parking space with charging available for 2 cars in a 4km radius in my neighborhood. Charging that is anyway not cost effective.
I wonder if the two things are related. There are hundreds of EV chargers within 4km of where I live and on average they are 20-50% cheaper than charging at home (with the exception of fast chargers, which are pretty expensive).
Even if the price were right, would I want to have to check every couple of hours if the parking space is available for me to charge my vehicle? These parking spaces are mostly used by visitors because EVs aren't convenient enough for locals.
I'm not going to argue that public EV charging is always convenient. It certainly sounds like it isnt where you are.
But where I am, >95% of chargers have real time availability via app or web. You can schedule notifications for when a charger is free, and some charging networks even let you reserve chargers ahead of time.
I live in a major European city. If I wanted to charge an electric car it would be at least a kilometers away and is often unavailable.
The comparison to gas is irrelevant and nonsensical since it takes minutes to fill up and gas stations are plenty. If I had an electric car I would want to charge it overnight near my home. That is not possible for me and I don't see that it is possible for many others.
>There's plenty of opportunities to charge your vehicle over night
A kilometer away and I would occupy that spot for the entire night. It is pretty obvious why I would not do that.
I don't really care about your theory crafting what I could and could not do. It is obvious that this is the reason Hybrid owners don't use their electric mode as often, since they can avoid going to great lengths to charge their car.
A factor could be the limited range on a single charge, which might not meet the daily travel needs unless there's convenient access to a charging station at home or work.
Additionally, the charging process in Europe involves carrying your own cables, which adds an extra layer of inconvenience—unlike in some places like China where charging stations provide the cables. - To open the trunk twice daily to get and put the heavy cables could deter regular charging, particularly for those using their PHEV for commuting.
I made some back-of-the-napkin calculations, and based on the electric range and outside charging prices it didn't seem like electric cars are really that much cheaper. The only time they clearly come out on top is when you can charge them at home at off peak hours, at least around here. PHEVs are in an even worse situation because even though they have a small battery, they need to be charged for quite some time, so outside charging is kind of off the table.
Those electricity prices are way off for California. PGE, which serves most of the state, charges over $0.30/kwh even off peak with a EV focused rate plan. Peak rates on any plan are much, much higher.
DC Fast charging prices are usually quite high (45-50 c/kwh and may well be near the cost of gas, but not all PHEV's support that. Level 2 charging is usually much cheaper (20-30 c/kwh) though slower. So if you can charge at one of those (such as at work) it also works out to be cheaper than gas.
Depends. Could be that people are going further than the charge. If the EV side lacks recombinant braking, you might not charge. If there is a dearth of street side charging, you might not charge. If there is a dearth of office charging, you might not charge.
A big issues off all forms of chargeable cars is the lack of charging stations. When there are charging stations, the amount of time required to charge dissuades people from charging. Perhaps they look at the 20 minutes to charge a baby PHEV and say, “no.”
Because most of these (PHEV) vehicles have a completely laughable EV range. For many commutes you’d have to plug in every ${DEITY}damn time you get home and likewise in the office, every day. Good luck if you have street parking at home or if your work only offers a handful of chargers (or zero).
The truth is that all of this was entirely foreseeable and PHEVs should never have been incentivized, but especially in Germany, the government is very, very much under the influence of big carmakers, and they were years behind in BEVs, so they had their way.
That's not partial zero in my book. It's at best "50% polluting" (making up the expected value here, but you get the point). Or "less polluting".. anything but "partial zero"
I think of it as a vector quantity with one (or more) components zero, and the rest nonzero. I agree it's a stupid name, but at least there's some reason to it. Misleading, but not entirely inaccurate.
In Germany you get tax benefits when buying a plugin hybrid instead of a pure gasoline car ... There's always been the legend that people return their leased PHEVs and the charging cable is still wrapped in plastic in the trunk and has never been used. Maybe there's some truth to this after all.
I guess the subsidy is too high if people bought these in preference to conventional ICE and then didn't take advantage of the improved mileage.
I am not entirely sure what the government could have done instead. Subsidizing public charging might have worked better - free fuel is a strong incentive - but then maybe people simply drive more. Or perhaps more likely they buy a hybrid thinking they'll charge it but find it to inconvenient.
As a car owner, I wish to see governments to invest in public transport. Cars mean freedom, and I love mine, but we shouldn't really use them for regular routes, like for commuting to work.
I have a PHEV and charge overnight from a wall outlet. I wake up in the morning fully charged. Probably 99% of my trips are electric, but only 80% of my miles. The occasional long road trip really adds up. It is also hard (in the US) to charge on a trip. My car can't charge from a DC fast charger (it doesn't have the right connector), only from the level 2 AC chargers. From a L2 charger it only charges at 3.3 KW (most chargers support between 6.6-10 KW) which results in ~10 miles of range per hour. So if I take a half hour lunch break while driving, that's only 5 miles added.
If you can charge at home or work it's a great deal, but if you can't I can see how it would be hard to charge it enough to make it worthwhile.
Don't plug in hybrids typically have a 20-30 mile range on the battery?
Unless I have a dedicated garage for my car it just sounds like a huge faff. The cost savings for plugging it in vs. fuelling it are probably something like 50 pence, and the only time I'm ever going to do that would be dangling a cable from a window if I manage to park outside the house.
There are a couple and the parking spaces are restricted for use only whilst charging, the cost is also double or so what I pay at home.
So basically for the sake of saving pennies I would have to hope that space is free, park in it, then move the car later when it's done, probably use some weird app because there's no normal way to pay, etc.
If I forget, then I get a £40+ parking ticket which would wipe out weeks/months of savings.
I don't own a PHEV but if I did I think I'd probably do it a few times for the novelty factor and then give up. It's not practical at all.
But is it also calculating the depreciation of the battery, which has a totally different lifetime than the rest of the car and causes a lot of emissions? Or is it insignificant?
Hybrids were mostly a tax scam in my opinion. In Germany until recently you could get a 6,000-8,000 € subsidy on these cars and when leasing them through a company you got a really nice tax reduction from 1% of the list price to 0,25 %, which amounts to several thousand Euros per year as well. Not to forget the vehicle tax was drastically reduced as well. Overall mostly very affluent people bought these cars, and the net effect for the environment was probably negative. It’s just a stupid idea to put a tiny battery into a 500 HP car and pretend it’s helping the environment when it just contributes to putting more cars on the road.
This is the same Germany who recently “halved” their plastic waste numbers by attaching milk bottle caps to the actual bottles so they’re counted as a single piece of waste instead of two…
> This is the same Germany who recently “halved” their plastic waste numbers by attaching milk bottle caps to the actual bottles so they’re counted as a single piece of waste instead of two…
Do you have any sources discussing this? Most waste numbers I've seen from France (where I live) and the EU are in volume or weight, neither of which will be affected by the caps remaining attached to bottles (which is an EU-wide thing IIRC).
That is simply a lie. And these are probably accounts for opinion making. It is an EU-wide regulation from 2019, which is now being implemented by all EU states [0]. In addition, the way in which plastic waste is counted is also prescribed throughout the EU [1].
As far as I can see this is only for "single-use plastic beverage bottles" and not milk cartons. I have seen the attached caps on Cola bottles for example, but neither glass bottles or milk cartons.
If you look on the actual data, it's the other way around. Is this just Russian opinion making?
1. The Greens didn't push to close the nuclear power plants alone:
The phase-out of nuclear energy in Germany was first regulated in the year 2000 under the red-green federal government (Schröder I Cabinet) through a contract known as the Nuclear Consensus between the Federal Republic and various operating companies. In 2002, the German Nuclear Energy Act was revised based on this contract. The Nuclear Consensus stipulated that, assuming a standard operational lifetime of about 32 years, a nuclear power plant was allowed to produce a specified "remaining electricity amount" before being decommissioned. Based on the electricity production of the individual plants in the past, the assigned remaining electricity amounts would mean that the last of the 19 German nuclear power plants would be decommissioned around 2021. Because the Nuclear Consensus allowed for the transfer of remaining electricity amounts between plants, the Stade (on November 14, 2003) and Obrigheim (on May 11, 2005) nuclear power plants were decommissioned.
On October 28, 2010, the Bundestag, with a black-yellow majority under the Merkel II Cabinet, decided on a further amendment to the Nuclear Energy Act, extending the operating times of the seven facilities that started operation before 1980 by eight years each, and those of the remaining ten nuclear power plants by 14 years each. This was publicly referred to as a "reversal of the phase-out." In return, the energy companies committed to an annual payment of 300 million euros for the years 2011 and 2012, and 200 million euros annually until 2016. The funds were intended to finance the Energy and Climate Fund. Furthermore, the federal government (as announced on September 6) introduced a nuclear fuel tax of 2.3 billion euros annually for six years, from January 1, 2011, to December 31, 2016.
This extension was revised in 2011 – following the onset of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This was publicly referred to as a "reversal of the reversal of the phase-out." After the announcement of a moratorium on operating times on March 14, 2011, the operators ceased their payments to the Energy and Climate Fund.
During the energy crisis following the energy conflict in 2022, the federal government allowed the continued operation of the last three nuclear power plants, Emsland, Isar 2, and Neckarwestheim 2, until mid-April 2023; this required a legislative change, as the Nuclear Energy Act of 2011 had definitively planned for a gradual phase-out by the end of 2022. In April 2023, the nuclear power plants Emsland, Isar 2, and Neckarwestheim 2 were taken offline.
>> The same Germany where the "Green party" pushed to close nuclear power plants and buy more gas from the Russians. Truly clown world.
> If you look on the actual data, it's the other way around. Is this just Russian opinion making?
>The Greens didn't push to close the nuclear power plants alone: [...]
Am I misreading your post? It looks like you're not really disagreeing with the claim that '"Green party" pushed to close nuclear power plants', just quibbling over some details like whether other parties were involved.
What's important for this dialog is time.
The Schröder 1 and the Merkel decision are decades old. Would it have been better to keep a health nuclear industry going? Yes, probably. But that was killed for good with 2011 reversal (Merkel, not Greens...). And even that would have been of questionable value because there would have been no new construction.
The red-green-yellow government in 2022 had a few remaining nuclears going but keeping them online would have been difficult and costly. So there was no real choice.
The real energy politics failure happened mostly under Merkel , but the greens are sooooo bad. Yes, ofc - it boiled over in 2021/2022 but we warned Merkel did not bother to set the necessary goals in the decades prior.
Kinda difficult to built new solar and wind energy quickly when your predecessor intentionally crippled that.
>Is this just Russian opinion making?
uhh my comment is objectively anti russian and accuses the greens of playing into their hands.
And I don't see how your comment refutes what I said. If anything it makes the case that not just the greens are anti nuclear but Germans in general have lost the plot and gone anti nuclear. Probably not the point you wanted to make, but there it is.
It was exactly the point I wanted to make. And you proofed it. Let me cite myself:
„1. The Greens didn't push to close the nuclear power plants alone:“
But: You think
„The same Germany where the "Green party" pushed to close nuclear power plants and buy more gas from the Russians. Truly clown world.“
is good style and promotes factual, also political, discussion? I believe that it is not and thus promotes the division and the intensification of the discourse instead of factual discussion. And Russia and the AfD are happy about that.
Russia would very much like to sell a lot of gas to all of us. Russia would very much like to continue to act as one of the main suppliers and main players in nuclear energy, which is why Russia also has something against renewable energies. But the division of Europe is more valuable.
I disagree, calling out Russian influence does not do them a favor. It clears the air. I called out the Greens specifically because they have the gall to call themselves the Green party when they support the opposite. And to probably misquote Linus, "Just because I say I like hotdogs doesn't mean I hate hamburgers." I didn't comment on the rest of German politics, nor should I have to in order to avoid accusations of "doing Russia's work". But yes, a great deal of German politics has been compromised for awhile now. The AFD is self explanatory but the SPD and CDU has their fair share of problems too. Schroder and Merkel both had pro Russian policies.
It absolutely helps. Even a small battery enable regenerative braking. Instead of simply losing all of your braking to heat, you capture some and use it on the next acceleration.
I have a hybrid truck. In city driving, it is twice as efficient as its non-hybrid counterpart. It’s also about 50% more efficient than our mid-sized SUV. It also has the benefit of being able to turn off the engine for an extended period of idling.
Unfortunately, it depends on where you are living. While cars in urban areas are a definite luxury, not having a car is the luxury outside of cities.
No amount of incentives and enhancements of public transportation will ever fix this issue for sparsely populated areas. You can try to reduce exhausts and travel distances with car, but you can't fight car ownership.
My parents live in such an area and they can commute to work and back fully electric. They charge overnight and always fall back to combustion for larger routes, such as the next airport.
If you ignore the needs of those people, you only strengthen political forces who also support big oil. There needs to be a middle ground.
Living in a sparsely populated area is the luxury here. You can live somewhere rural, somewhere small, but still within biking distance of everything you need daily and within train or bus of weekly needs.
I'm afraid missing the nuances of people's livelihood is exactly the point I tried to make:
> If you ignore the needs of those people, you only strengthen political forces who also support big oil. There needs to be a middle ground.
How are you even transporting your weekly groceries without a car? What if you have family? And do you also use your bike during heavy rain/winter/strong heat? It just doesn't work in practice.
Virtually nobody moves to rural areas. People have been living there for generations. You can't expect them to mass-migrate somewhere else you must address their needs. If people have the impression that nobody supports them, you get extremists.
> How are you even transporting your weekly groceries without a car?
My bicycle rear rack is rated for 25KG and I have 2 70L bags, my Wald front basket can handle some additionnal load and I converted my old kids trailer to carry groceries too. I can carry enough.
But you don't have to buy a week worth of groceries in a single day.
Also we are in 2024. Supermarkets do deliveries.
> What if you have family?
There are seats for toddlers and cargo bikes and trailers for those that need to carry more than one. After that kids love cycling. We are constantly saying humans have a way too sedentary life and people need to exercise in order to be healthy. You have here a solution much cheaper both in term of time and money than going to the gym.
> And do you also use your bike during heavy rain/winter/strong heat?
You just deal with it the same way you do when you have to walk from your car in that huge parking lot to the place you are actually going to.
The only limiter is climbs. But if I was limited by my climbing capacity while loaded I would use an e-bike.
I don't get these kinds of arguments. Even if rural areas still use cars, reducing pollution in urban areas (the ones, you know, most populated) still brings massive improvements to everyone (if nothing else, the ruralites aren't stuck in traffic as much when they inevitably commute into cities) and has very measureable health benefits for everyone in the cities.
Where does this silly idea that "let's use more public transport in cities" requires rural areas to not use cars come from?
"Urban" in the US doesn't mean a dense city where mass transit makes sense. Loads of areas in the US are "urban" but due to design are practically entirely car dependent. Houses are in seas of single family homes with large lots. Stores are islands separated by massive parking lots. Bolting on a bus service to those designs means driving tons of empty busses (lots of different routes because things are everywhere) and long walks (everything is an island) to connect to things.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do mass transit. I like it, I want to see more of it. But thinking it's just a matter of buying more busses isn't reality for a lot of the US. We pretty much need to redesign our cities and towns for transit to be successful. Rug-pulling people by building out transit-unfriendly cities and then banning cars isn't going to go over well.
To be posts like yours sound like you actually are saying you shouldn't do mass transit - they're always full of excuses and reasons to delay, avoid and not move on it. You seem to reduce someone saying "let's do mass transit" to "let's buy more busses" and then argue against it.
No, I agree, we should do mass transit. I want more of it. I use what's already there when it makes sense. I'd love to massively reduce my VMT.
But take for example my neighborbood. There's bus lines on the north edge going east-west, bus lines on the west edge going north-south. I'm lucky, I live at the west edge of my neighborhood near one of the entrances so the north line stop is just outside my door. The south bound stop is across six lanes of 40+mph traffic with the nearest crosswalk over a quarter mile. It's a half-mile walk from my house to the east-west stop on the north edge of my neighborhood. And I'm in the middle-west edge of my neighborhood, if you're in the south-east of the neighborhood you've got about a mile walk to get to a bus stop. And my neighborhood isn't even a very big one for DFW.
It doesn't make sense to snake the busses all throughout the neighborhoods, you'll spend all the bus travel time going up and down residential streets. Nobody wants to ride on a bus slowly crawling through the maze of residences.
And even then, once I get on the bus half the travel time is just going past one development of houses after another. And I'm in a generally denser and more mixed part of the city than a lot of these places. Lots of my friends live in neighborhoods where it's at least a 5-10min drive to leave their neighborhood. Then they pass by a few neighborhoods before they get to the first small smatterings of retail, but chances are it doesn't have the stop they're interested in.
Transit really just can't function with this design. We need to redesign this to make it work. Cut up these massive residential only blocks, mix in some retail, densify things, etc. I'm not saying this to suggest we can't do it, I'm just being realistic to the challenges at hand. Burying your head in the sand acting like it's just a matter of another train line or more bus service or adding bike lanes isn't going to solve the systemic design issues we have in a lot of US cities and towns.
by talking to politician from Urban areas. (This is just my real life experience). I live in an urban area, also talk to people from car friendly places and they complain about lack of parking areas which is no surprise in a city (and stupid to build more)
Politicians from Urban areas otherwise hate cars and want to forbid everywhere including rural areas. I just wonder why people cant understand that different places need different stuff.
>you got a really nice tax reduction from 1% of the list price to 0,25 %, which amounts to several thousand Euros per year as well
how does a 0.75 percentage point savings amount to "several thousand Euros per year"?
>Overall mostly very affluent people bought these cars,
Tesla buyers tend to be affluent as well. Should we cancel EV tax credits for them as well?
>and the net effect for the environment was probably negative
I don't get it. According to the EPA at least hybrids have much better fuel efficiency than their conventional counterparts. Therefore I don't understand how the hybrids would be a net negative.
When you get a company car your personal taxable income increases by 1% of the car's list price per month. Tax law assumes a 1% personal use of the car. You can avoid this tax by keeping a log book of all car rides indicating personal or business use. 1% of a $60,000 car is $7,200 per year. At a tax rate of 42% it's "several thousand Euros per year"
For EVs this tax was reduced to 0.25% to further incentivise the adoption.
