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Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

Except now you're lugging around the weight of the gas engine and taking on all the extra maintenance complexity of the gas engine, just on the off chance that for some reason you're going to need to road trip longer than the equivalent pure EV's range and won't be able to rent a more appropriate vehicle for it.

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Of the cars I've had in the past 15 years, the engine has never been the problem. Routine oil changes, maybe spark plugs, but saying engines need major maintenance just isn't true.

NOW, 2 of the 3 cars I've had in the past 15 years have destroyed their catalytic converters. Almost certainly from the fact that much of their driving is short-quick trips. Catalytic converter can't heat up to optimal temps and burn off residual combustion material.

PHEV almost entirely solve this problem. Run on battery for the short hops. Run on the engine for long trips. Additionally, PHEV can utilize both a smaller ICE engine and run it at more efficient workloads. PHEVs can rely on the electric motor to provide surge capacity during acceleration then recharge during cruising.

On top off all of that, PHEV can do regenerative breaking. An ICE engine has simply no way to recover energy while braking.

The key words in your comment are 3 cars (plural) and 15 years. 15 years is a typical lifespan for one car. And the thing most commonly limiting that lifetime is the engine breaking, totaling the car. My guess is that this will be happening later with a PHEV because you use the engine less. On the other hand the battery will break down faster than in an pure BEV because less battery capacity means also more cycles, which is the thing that will break them down.

> And the thing most commonly limiting that lifetime is the engine breaking, totaling the car.

Where I live, it's almost always rust.

Can't you say that for anything? If you can go 300 miles on a charge and you only drive 50 miles, you're lugging around 250 miles worth of extra battery and all of that complexity. I'm also transporting an extra tire everywhere!

A 300 mile battery is not appreciably more complex than a 50 mile one. The weight is a waste, but there's no extra maintenance burden.

My maintenance burden on a 2AR-FE engine (the one in the rav) is ~$30 oil and filter every 10k miles (once a year). That's literally it. It will run 150k miles with literally nothing but oil changes (well you should change the antifreeze too, but it'll usually keep going regardless). IDK what the maintenance burden is of the battery + electric motor. It's probably lower, but then again $300 / 100k miles is barely a blip on the radar.

It's almost certainly less maintenance for well designed electric but the rav4 engine is just dead nuts reliable with almost no maintenance. For most people it's like an hour a work once a year while you drink a beer.

The other issue, is Toyota gas vehicles have such stupid low depreciation that maintenance + depreciation ends up coming out ahead on the gas vehicle vs EVs on the market.

It's not literally just an extra engine you're carrying around, it's the whole ICE drivetrain and exhaust system: engine, starter, air intake, transmission, alternator, oil pump, fuel tank and fuel pump, gas lines, catalytic converter, muffler, all the various sensors for the engine, etc. Electric cars have none of those.

Thanks to government subsidies in place for 14 years so far and locked in for at least another 10, I've experienced no actual depreciation on my electric cars to date. I've actually made money upgrading to a new one every few years. My current daily driver is a 2021 VW ID4 that had a sticker price of $44K, $36.5K after the federal tax credit, and Carvana offered me a bit over $43K if I want to sell it today.

>It's not literally just an extra engine you're carrying around, it's the whole ICE drivetrain and exhaust system: engine, starter, air intake, transmission, alternator, oil pump, fuel tank and fuel pump, gas lines, catalytic converter, muffler, all the various sensors for the engine, etc. Electric cars have none of those.

So I was an electrical engineer and designed (and hand wired) a complete drive system for an electric vehicle company. Electric car has, in some sense, all of those. It has a motor(s) instead of a starter. It has an inverter and gearbox instead of a 'transmission' [0]. It has a rectifier / charging system instead of a fuel pump. It has a DC/DC converter instead of an alternator. It has HV electrical distribution network instead of gas lines. Instead of the metals in a catalytic converter or a gas tank, you have hundreds of pounds of chemistries such as lithium nickel cobalt aluminium oxide. Instead of a muffler or air intake, you have air and fluid cooling systems for the batteries. There are 'all various sensors' for battery temperature and status monitoring as well as for positioning and feedback of the motors.

[0] https://cleantechnica.com/files/2018/03/jack-rickard-motor-1...

My grandma gave me $7500 to buy a car so I can sell it for a profit!

   -- the logic that 'because tax credits' the car didn't depreciate.

I bought my Toyota new off the lot in 2020 for $29k and Carvana offered $31k in 2022, without taxing/inflating/indebting grandma and the rest of the populace $7500.

> So I was an electrical engineer and designed a drive system for an electric vehicle company. Electric car has, in some sense, all of those. It has a motor(s) instead of a starter. It has an inverter and gearbox instead of a 'transmission' [0]. It has a rectifier / charging system instead of a fuel pump. It has a DC/DC converter instead of an alternator. It has HV electrical distribution network instead of gas lines. Instead of the metals in a catalytic converter or a gas tank, you have hundreds of pounds of chemistries such as lithium nickel cobalt aluminium oxide. Instead of a muffler or air intake, you have air and fluid cooling systems for the batteries. There are 'all various sensors' for battery temperature and status monitoring as well as for positioning and feedback of the motors.

The point is that in a plug-in hybrid you still need all that. You're carrying around two full drivetrains instead of one, for a benefit that might actually be pretty marginal.

What about smog checks, belts, and making sure the gas tank doesn't dry out?

Also, the transmission for an ICE is far more complicated, fuel pumps could fail, the muffler / exhaust manifold could get knocked off by something, the radiator could leak...

At least one of those things is likely to happen over the 10 year warranty that new car batteries come with (by law, moving forward) in the US.

However, a 300-mile battery is appreciably heavier than a 50-mile battery: it wastes energy on the extra mass. Why carry around 100s of pounds of extra battery on the off-chance of going on a road trip when most people have a round-trip commute distance less than 100 miles?

ICE drivetrains are extremely mature technology and the amount of "extra complexity" that EV absolutists are always barking about isn't that high. The tradeoff that pure EVs make is that you haul around 4500 pounds of dead batteries everywhere, which isn't great either.

My plug-in Clarity has had zero, and I mean literally zero, extra maintenance visits over and above what you'd expect from a pure EV. I take it in every year to inspect the tie rods ends, ball joints, brakes etc and while it's there they change the oil. Whoop-de-doo.

I know Tesla does not recommend regular inspection and lubrication for chassis and suspension which gives owners of young cars the illusion of maintenance freedom, but I view it as just Tesla having no idea how to support a fleet of long-lived cars and lacking the service network to make it work.

> The tradeoff that pure EVs make is that you haul around 4500 pounds of dead batteries everywhere, which isn't great either.

A Kia Niro PHEV that can go 25 miles on its battery, and a Kia Niro EV that can go 240 miles on its battery, are only about 400 pounds apart. That's like carrying around two passengers, which has negligible impact on fuel efficiency or road wear.

> and won't be able to rent a more appropriate vehicle for it.

For me at least that's the rule, not the exception. I travel when there are holidays, and that's when lots of other people rent cars. Maybe I can find a car to rent, but it's going to be hundreds of dollars per day. A lot of people find this to be less than ideal.

If that gas engine security blanket is what drivers need to accept buying an EV with a 40-mile range, well, polictics is the art of the possible.

And I would take that trade every single time compared to renting a car.

For many people it is not "the off chance". You may commute fixed < 40 miles during weekdays but then you are driving off to >100miles every other weekend or may be even weekends. People living in cities and may be one with families doesn't do this regularly but there is ~20% of population in my guestimate can't live with 40 miles EV range.

That's the perfect use-case for PHEV

Fair point. The alternative however is to spend the same amount (or more) on an EV and have to rent a car for weekend trips.

What weekend trips are you taking that are regularly more than 250 miles and completely out of reach of a 240V outlet for overnight charging?

Not sure about OP but I live in the American southwest and that would be a pretty normal weekend trip. No 240V outlets in the desert, and if you run out of electricity and can't get ahold of someone you will likely die unless you can find a water source quickly. A 5 gallon jug of gas in the bed will generally at least get me to a spring if I run out of gas -- perhaps there's the 5 gallon jug equivalent of extra batteries?

I'd also note the depreciation on toyota off-road capable vehicles that would go on these kind of weekend trips (like gas rav4 / tacoma) is stupid low. Like stupid stupid low. To the point many people who bought new in 2020 might get more money now than before they drove it off the lot. Not sure if there's any EVs with only ~29.5% 5 year expected depreciation like say a Tacoma Toyota has.

The price difference between a new Nissan leaf and a five year old one is currently less than the federal tax subsidy.

Teslas are similar.

Shifting the subsidy onto some other poor sod doesn't eliminate the depreciation. It's like saying I didn't lose money because grandma gave me $7500 to buy the car.

I don't own a car (I only do occasional weekend trips, so renting as required is much cheaper). But both of the two trips I've done this year met your criteria. They were camping trips to campsites without power outlets available.

That feels all over a better deal to me. I don’t need a long-range vehicle often.

Batteries also weigh a lot and are expensive. May be cheaper to add a small gas engine and tank.

So you go full ev or just going gas?

There's still complexity involved in the gas one .

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