Why aren't there any 80/20 PHEVs?
Discussion
My BiL's Tesla Model X is hugely impressive, but if driven with any weight in your right foot does require a half hour stop (assuming you don't get to a recharging point and find a queue) every 200 miles or so to recharge the battery. Not ideal if going on holiday, for example.
With my C350e, I can obviously fill up with petrol much faster, but I can only do around 10-15 miles purely on batteries.
Of course my C350e is a first gen PHEV, and many others will do double that, but even so, I've done 650 of the last 968 petrol free because most of my trips are short local ones.
What this means in effect is that I get 65mpg+ on urban driving, but this drops to around 35mpg on long journeys.
On many of those long journeys, I'd be perfectly happy trundling along at 70-80 without the need for quick acceleration, so it seems to me that the ideal PHEV would be one not which gets the majority of its range from petrol, but from electricity. If I could buy a car which could do sub 7 second to 60, have let's say a 150 mile battery range and then a small petrol engine which in its own could do maybe that 70-80mph with a 0-60 of maybe 15 seconds, this would feel like the ideal car. I'd be able to do 95% of my driving petrol free and save a lot of cash, but still have the option on longer journeys of pressing on slowly on petrol rather than stopping for long recharging spells.
As far as I know, however, no such car exists, and I have to wonder why?
With my C350e, I can obviously fill up with petrol much faster, but I can only do around 10-15 miles purely on batteries.
Of course my C350e is a first gen PHEV, and many others will do double that, but even so, I've done 650 of the last 968 petrol free because most of my trips are short local ones.
What this means in effect is that I get 65mpg+ on urban driving, but this drops to around 35mpg on long journeys.
On many of those long journeys, I'd be perfectly happy trundling along at 70-80 without the need for quick acceleration, so it seems to me that the ideal PHEV would be one not which gets the majority of its range from petrol, but from electricity. If I could buy a car which could do sub 7 second to 60, have let's say a 150 mile battery range and then a small petrol engine which in its own could do maybe that 70-80mph with a 0-60 of maybe 15 seconds, this would feel like the ideal car. I'd be able to do 95% of my driving petrol free and save a lot of cash, but still have the option on longer journeys of pressing on slowly on petrol rather than stopping for long recharging spells.
As far as I know, however, no such car exists, and I have to wonder why?
oop north said:
To get decent range on both battery and motor you are going to have big batteries and big motor and fuel tank so lots of weight and packaging issues
Not really. Yes, if you wanted to keep the same performance you'd be right, but if it's there just as a range extender, would that still be the case?Let's say I can get 150 miles out of batteries. That does cover pretty much every trip I'd likely do except for summer holidays, but on a summer holiday I might well do 400+ miles in a day on French motorways. That's doable, but if I've got to add on an extra hour or more for re-charging, it becomes really frustrating.
If, on the other hand, I can still drive at motorway speeds on a smaller motor (albeit without the acceleration) and have a small fuel tank to give me 100 or so miles of extra range, then I lose far less time refueling, and possibly more importantly, I'm not worried about potentially not being able to find a charging point somewhere in the arse end of rural France...
Max_Torque said:
Adding 20% of eMachine to 80% of ICE is easy.
You need a small chunk of boot/underfloor/fueltank area for the small, cheap battery pack, and the eMachine is small enough to stick in with the transmission. You don't need to redesign the car, so it can be applied to current models. For a low outlay, your marketing dept can crow on about how environmentally good your cars are (self charging hybrid anyone.....) and you can use all the latest buzz words to people buying your car (It's a PHEV don't you know sir), and in the real world, for a lot of people, actually having say 20 miles of EV range, or the fuel saving from regen with an assistance style system does make a significant improvement to the fuel costs (because lots of people do actually do pretty short daily trips)
Adding a 20% ICE to an 80% eMAchine is hard.
The ICE brings all sorts of requirements that an BEV doesn't have, like exhausts, fuel tanks, cooling packs, clutches, air intake etc, and your BEV is probably designed to fit in the most number of batteries already, so the space for the ICE is simply not availiable, especially as you can't mount an ICE just anyhow, unlike with a eMachine that can be jammed in anywhere and doesn't care. And of course, small ICEs aren't efficient (thanks to the fundamental physics of surface area to volume ratio) and their costs is not particularly capacity dependant (ie a 1.0 litre ICE does not cost half that of a 2.0 litre engine (it costs around 90% of it!). And with an ICE, you suddenly as a manufacturer need to jump through a massive number of SignOff, Certification and Legaslative hoops that take vast amounts of time and money
So you do all that expensive work and development, the cost of the vehicle spirals upwards, the complexity spirals upwards, and it only solves a single problem (lack of non-stopping range), that once you get to a certain battery size for your EV bit, that range becomes less and less of an issue. It takes no great genius to see that is you have space and money to fit an ICE to an EV, then you are far better using that space and cost to just fit a bigger battery! (esp. as the cost per kWh of storage has plumeted in the last few years) Companies like Tesla simply could not compete with the existing big OEs if they tried to make an ICE vehicle, or even a ReX, and yet, their BEVs are competitive and now getting to be class leading in fact..;
I have a small battery (22 kWh) I3 without the ReX, and i'm so glad i didn't saddle the car with all that extra mass, complexity and phaff, it's a far better car without all that guff.........
Ah... That all makes sense, thanks! You need a small chunk of boot/underfloor/fueltank area for the small, cheap battery pack, and the eMachine is small enough to stick in with the transmission. You don't need to redesign the car, so it can be applied to current models. For a low outlay, your marketing dept can crow on about how environmentally good your cars are (self charging hybrid anyone.....) and you can use all the latest buzz words to people buying your car (It's a PHEV don't you know sir), and in the real world, for a lot of people, actually having say 20 miles of EV range, or the fuel saving from regen with an assistance style system does make a significant improvement to the fuel costs (because lots of people do actually do pretty short daily trips)
Adding a 20% ICE to an 80% eMAchine is hard.
The ICE brings all sorts of requirements that an BEV doesn't have, like exhausts, fuel tanks, cooling packs, clutches, air intake etc, and your BEV is probably designed to fit in the most number of batteries already, so the space for the ICE is simply not availiable, especially as you can't mount an ICE just anyhow, unlike with a eMachine that can be jammed in anywhere and doesn't care. And of course, small ICEs aren't efficient (thanks to the fundamental physics of surface area to volume ratio) and their costs is not particularly capacity dependant (ie a 1.0 litre ICE does not cost half that of a 2.0 litre engine (it costs around 90% of it!). And with an ICE, you suddenly as a manufacturer need to jump through a massive number of SignOff, Certification and Legaslative hoops that take vast amounts of time and money
So you do all that expensive work and development, the cost of the vehicle spirals upwards, the complexity spirals upwards, and it only solves a single problem (lack of non-stopping range), that once you get to a certain battery size for your EV bit, that range becomes less and less of an issue. It takes no great genius to see that is you have space and money to fit an ICE to an EV, then you are far better using that space and cost to just fit a bigger battery! (esp. as the cost per kWh of storage has plumeted in the last few years) Companies like Tesla simply could not compete with the existing big OEs if they tried to make an ICE vehicle, or even a ReX, and yet, their BEVs are competitive and now getting to be class leading in fact..;
I have a small battery (22 kWh) I3 without the ReX, and i'm so glad i didn't saddle the car with all that extra mass, complexity and phaff, it's a far better car without all that guff.........
JD said:
Kermit power said:
As far as I know, however, no such car exists, and I have to wonder why?
Because you are comparing apples with oranges.If you used the same size car example as your own for example a model 3 which when trundling along the motorway at about 70 will get 300 miles, when your own car would get only 350 miles - it hardly seems worth carrying two powertrains for that extra 50 miles range does it?
If you stick a small engine in - and from comments so far, this would clearly be as a range extender charging the batteries rather than driving the wheels - then you can keep yourself going by just stopping at any petrol station. There's far more of them, and it only takes you a couple of minutes.
I do realise that for many people this isn't an issue, and even for those who tend to drive in to Europe on holiday it's probably only an issue once or twice a year, but I'm in that category, and at the moment it would keep me from going to a pure EV.
JD said:
Kermit power said:
What do you do if you've got 30 miles of range left, and the next nearest charging point is 60 miles away?
I mean, what do you do in your petrol car?Gassing Station | EV and Alternative Fuels | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff