Comment by fiftyfifty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fiftyfifty | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion hybrids are the worst of both worlds, resulting in excess expense and maintenance in the long run. We've had two Toyota Priuses in our family over the last 10 years, both of which had to have their battery packs replaced somewhere over 100k miles. The number of places around that refurbish hybrid battery packs or sells completely new ones tells me this is a common issue, an entire industry has built up around this problem. It cost us over $2,000 for each car which completely negated any money we might have saved on gas over the lifetime of the vehicle. On top of that another dirty little secret about Toyota's hybrid system is their Atkinson cycle engines like to burn oil as they get older, there are literally hundreds of threads on various Prius forums and sub-Reddits about the problem. I see it all the time when I'm behind Priuses at a stop light now: there's that little puff of smoke coming out of the tailpipe when the engine restarts. It is literally Toyota's dirty little secret. How can you have an environmentally friendly car that burns oil? Here's just one example of such a thread:

https://priuschat.com/threads/excessive-oil-consumption-expl...

My wife drives a 2 year old Tesla Model 3 now and it's been completely maintenance free for 32k miles so far, we've barely even seen any degradation in the battery pack capacity. I will never buy another hybrid vehicle from Toyota and I can't recommend them to anyone else either. Toyota would do well to accelerate their transition to full BEV vehicles like VW and others are doing if they want to be able to still claim to be an environmentally responsible car company.

At the civilization view/level of "holy crap we have to get off of ICE", PHEVs are critically important to migrating the transportation system off of carbon in the very near term.

Basically, consider that battery supply is going to be functionally limited compared to the number of cars that there are on the road.

If a decent range (40 miles+) PHEV can make all-electric 90% of daily trips and mileage, then that is basically the most optimal design/allocation of limited resources.

I'm not saying we don't work on all-BEVs. But PHEVs shouldn't just be incentivized, they should practically be required for all non-specialized consumer car purchases, or you suffer a very rapidly phasing in car and registration tax.

The atkinson cycle engine is likely a bit new in terms of engineering and maturity, and while your "puff of smoke" will be significant, again, a good PHEV will handle 90% of trips all-electric.

In particular, if we can get a good PHEV design using LFP chemistry (cheap, plentiful, wide temperature range, safe, and very very deep recharge cycle limits), that will help enormously.

And I have a very dim view of Toyota. They could have PHEV'd a decade ago or earlier (Prius and Insight were on the road in 2001 remember) and have mystifyingly dragged their feet in adopting them.

Hybrids may be the worst of both worlds, but a plugin hybrid is so much more flexible than a battery only car. You don't need to commit to having access to charging infrastructure for as long as you own your car. But if you do have access to charging that's less expensive than gas, you can use it. I've seen kits that probably void you warranty to use plug-in priuses as a backup for your house that can run off the battery and charge from the engine as needed.

Yes, you have to bring the engine and its dependencies wherever you go, and that adds weight, but you'd need a lot more batteries to get a decent range otherwise.

If you can charge at home or work for your usual stuff, and only use the engine for longer distance driving, you'll tend to use the majority of your liquid fuel at the top of the efficiency range, which isn't too bad for the envitonment.

My PHEV has a two year regular maintenance window, and maintenance so far has been pretty simple. Toyota's oil burning isn't limited to Priuses, my spouse's 2000ish Camry had a warranty extension for oil burning issues.

The tesla range + charging network eliminates most "what if" situations.

Not it you buy a toyota. Or if you want to drive around when there's a regional power outage. (If you live in an area with common power outages due to storms and such, some of the gas stations will have generators)

Not to defend the Prius too much, I wouldn't buy one, but it seems like you are being a little tough on them. The thread you linked to about the oil burning problem starts with a post containing... the solution to the oil burning problem?

> It cost us over $2,000 for each car which completely negated any money we might have saved on gas over the lifetime of the vehicle.

Really? I haven't done the math and I imagine it's heavily dependent on what vehicle you're comparing it to, but... $2k is not an expensive repair for a $30k, 10 year old car.

Maintenance is a bitch for sure, but within our budget the cheapest PHEV on the market (the Prius Prime) was our only option for an electric car. We took the plunge, knowing that this car is a middle step, and we don’t intend to keep it past its rental period. In our price range, the only other electric options were a golf cart or a bike ;)

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