This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Important to know that real-world testing shows that PHEVs are rarely plugged in and just burn oil much of the time
That’s a shame. I love my PHEV because it’s an EV for driving around the city, but I can still use gas stations on road trips. I plug it in everywhere I can.
Same here, and I am hoping that as battery density increases I may be able to extend the range on mine when the car gets old enough for a rebuild.
They still get way better gas mileage. They also don't cost $15,000 when the battery goes bad. I replaced my 12 year old prius battery myself in like two hours after buying a brand new $2,900 replacement from the Toyota dealership. Could have just bought and replaced the bad cell in it, but in a 12 year old battery I'd probably have another to replace within a year and just have to keep going in and replacing one after the other, which would be a pain.
Thanks for sharing this. Very interesting and a little surprising. I love my phev and keep it charged as much as possible because I notice acceleration benefits, pre-conditioning benefits, and obvious fuel savings, as well as time saving not having to gas up. I also have no fears of battery discharge like I would with full electric. I live in the states and charging stations are still pretty rare outside major metro areas and a lot of things are pretty spread out here so I still find full EV unfortunately a bit impractical. I CN imagine anyone not charging their phev whenever the opportunity presents.
This is a bit surprising to me tbh, Europe seems like the perfect place for little 100 mile range EV’s to kick ass. Over here in North America I can see hybrids being the current hot ticket because people regularly drive hundreds of miles for trips and work. Seems less common there but I may be wrong
It’s an issue of charging. Europe has cities that are very old. Streets are narrower than North America. Many apartments don’t have underground parking. Cars are parked on the street. There’s nowhere to plugin the EV overnight.
Definitely this. And it can be very difficult to connect your meter to your parking spot.
In France if you have a parking spot, you have a legal right to get a plug there even if you're renting.
It doesn't fix the problem for people with no parking who do only street parking, but people who can't afford a parking spot rarely buy a shiny new EV to start with.
People still go on holiday once or twice a year, snd many travel by car and always prefer their own car over rental. A 100 mile range EV being good for 95% of your use cases doesn't help you much with the other 5%.
People need to hire vehicles occasionally rather than buy more polluting vehicles against some rare edge case
I'm not saying they shouldn't rent a car for these occasions, I'm just saying that's probably the reason why hybrids are more popular.
Cagers have this argument of "but what if I want to do this cross country trip to bumfucknowhere" ... Similar to when asked why they can't give up their car "what if I want to transport a washing machine" ... As if those people load up their cars with 5 tons of bulky cargo and be driving around the world on a daily basis and there not being any other ways to handle such edge cases.
To be fair, this could be an argument. I don't have a car now, and when I do buy it - the usecase would be long road trips to where public transport is bad or carrying cargo to my vacation house. Only half of that would be easily doable with an EV's range. For city commutes, public transport is preferred, and trips to the vacation house without cargo could be made on electric trains faster.
I was buying new (used) car half a year ago. There were two reasons why I ended with ICE again.
Price. EV, even used ones, are so damn expensive it's just not for normal people. Everyone is saying how they lose value instantly and so on, but when I look at the market, even the cheapest ones (over 10 years old Nissan Leaf that will do less than 80 km on battery at summer) are ridiculously priced compared to ICE of the same age and similar specs. At least that's what it is in my country.
Chargers. I live in an appartement without garage, parking on the street. No way to charge it with "cheap household electricity" over night. There are I believe 3 chargers in my ~15k town and every single one is ridiculously overpriced. 1 kWh there costs almost as half a litre of gas. Considering fuel/electricity consumption, this is making the cost per km of both options virtually identical for me.
Everyone around me is very EV-skeptical and old fashioned. I'm not and I'm cheering for EVs. So I really wanted to switch, but hell it wasn't making any sense yet.
Batteries are expensive, range causes anxiety, a small battery is possible in a hybrid thus price is lower
Yeah and new plug in hybrids get like 50 miles or so of range. So most people can use that for work commutes and everyday stuff, etc, but still have the gas engine for their long road trips
Except people don't plug in their hybrids and run them on fossil fuels. Hybrids are yet another way the FF industry keeps itself going while pretending things are being fixed
Since the study was from Europe I'm going to assume that the primary thing holding people back from plugging in is that they can't. Many, if not most, of them will live in multi-tenant dwellings and most of those dwellings likely don't have the infrastructure to make it possible.
It's the same problem that apartment dwellers here in the US have, there's nowhere convenient to recharge.
Yeah infra is the issue. Which is stupid as providing simple (16A) socket per car would be sufficient solution for most cars. You come back from work or your commute and just plug the car to slow charger. Over night you are charged enough for next day.
Nah. Anxiety is something you have for first month owning your first EV. Once you adjust to the different way of using the car you realize you drive the same way as petroleum car. One important thing is being able to charge at home IMO. Even from just a socket (16A) is sufficient for most daily cases.
It seems to be a misleading title.
It mentions a European associations data but then they only point to the German Market, that Germans are cooling on electric.
I see no numbers for that being the case in say in Denmark where I live, where even people with hybrids are switching to electric due to legislation placing hybrids in the same category as CE cars. No body here is "cooling on electric" and we have a much higher rate of adoption than Germany, easily veried by a small trip over the border.
Europeans are not cooling on electric, maybe Germans are, but Germans are Europes "Murica" when it comes to cars. They require huge German SUVs with a minimum speed of 200 kmh on the autobahn...
Also isnt is because subsides on electric cars ended so either A everyone bought while you could get them cheaper so the demand has fallen of B they are more expensive so naturaly pepole are picking cheaper car. It doesnt really matter if car will save you 30000 thousands euro throught it lifetime on fuel if you dont have 30000 more to spend.
Ultimately we will see in a year whetewer electric cars just went to its natural equlibrium without subsidies and its share will continue to rise once again or its an actual trend.
It's sad to see the oil industry's propaganda campaign working so well.
It’s infrastructure. Too inconvenient to find a spot to charge, the apartments where you live probably don’t have chargers, your workplace doesn’t either…
In France installing a charger in appartement building is mandatory if the resident asks for it, even if they're renting.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
According to figures from the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association (ACEA), BEVs accounted for 12.5 percent of the EU car market, a drop from 13.8 percent a year ago.
Electric vehicles in the EU tend to be more expensive than their traditionally powered siblings, and charging infrastructure in the region requires investment if the EU's CO2 reduction targets are to be met.
Another survey [PDF] found the top three challenges facing BEVs were price, a lack of availability of private recharging, and too few public recharging points.
A recent report found that at the end of 2023, the EU had 632,423 public charging points, serving around 3 million BEVs.
According to the UK's Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the BEV market share in the UK for the year to May 2024 stood at 16.1 percent, slightly up from the same period last year, when the figure was 15.7 percent.
A survey with more than 19,000 respondents – of which just over 2,000 were BEV drivers – by the European Alternative Fuels Observatory found that just over half of non-electric car drivers (57 percent) were considering an electric car purchase, but nearly two-thirds of all respondents considered cost as a barrier.
The original article contains 392 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 49%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
but nearly two-thirds of all respondents considered cost as a barrier.
That's really the only thing preventing mass adaptation, but as long as they're so expensive (which they likely will be until we see a new battery technology) they simply aren't a viable choice for many people.
Many of the people who are willing to spend a fortune on a vehicle already get an EV in the last few years (which they still are using rn), resulting in declining sales. It is time to cater to a broader market: more budget conscious people!
I just don't trust the used market or resale value of these things. I bought a new ICE vehicle and don't plan on considering EV or electric for at least another decade
I always wonder who is buying brand new vehicles. Why buy new instead of a car from one year ago?
EVs are more expensive up front, then cost less as electricity is cheaper than gas. And cheaper maintenance and longer lifespan.
Vimes Boots Theory.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
