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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

With our last purchase, we went half-way and got the plug-in hybrid Chrysler Pacifica minivan (which replaced a Prius which replaced a Mazda 6 so it's been a continuous evolution). It's likely that the next car will be a full-on EV.

Assuming you have an acceptable parking/charging solution available, a plug-in hybrid is a good option. The Chrysler uses gas more often in the winter to run the heater but even before the pandemic, we'd go a year on five tanks of gasoline (four of which were in the winter months).

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I'm curious if you've run into any issues (Or worried about) cycling gas that long. I know that gas can "go bad" over the span of 6 months - 1 year. Do you ever intentionally run the gas, just so you can burn some and put new in?

After a certain amount of time (and/or some other conditions) the Pacifica hybrid will go into "fuel and oil refresh mode" while you are driving and start using the fuel to run the engine.

In a modern sealed automotive fuel tank gas isn't going bad in 6mo. Most fuel injected cars will run on years old gas well enough.

Your lawn equipment with its poorly sealed fuel tank and carburetor is a different story.

It has a pressurized gas tank. The way I found out about the Pacifica plug-in was when I rented a conventional one, and noticed that it also has a pressurized gas tank.

I usually do a 180 mile round trip once a month in mine, so I don't need to worry about bad gas.

Gas doesn't go bad as fast as people pretend. Yes it has lost a bit of octane rating sitting around, but unless you are driving a 30+ year old performance engine with high compression your car isn't going to notice the loss of a few octane points. Anything within the last 15 years measures and adjusts for fuel octane rating automatically and won't care, and anything non-performance that is older was designed expecting fuel octane to be lower than what it is sold as. Also these days most places add 10% ethanol to all pump gas which has a higher octane than gasoline and is replacing some of the old high-octane components of fuel that evaporated and caused gas to go bad sooner.

As someone else noted, it will occasionally go into fuel and oil refresh mode and run the engine if it doesn't happen naturally.

Do you have problems charging on a 30 amp charger? Mine will randomly stop charging when it's a 30-amp charger. (But it charges fine at 15 amps.)

I honestly have no idea. We use the stock 120V charger at home and occasionally will charge at a public charging station if it's available. I couldn't tell you word one about amps.

Is your 30 amp wire at home? Do you have a 30 amp circuit breaker as well? An electrician told me that if there is a mismatch between the current and the circuit breaker amperage it can cause the software to think that something is wrong (not sure how the car's software would infer anything about the breaker but so I was told).

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