this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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The second one sounds an awful lot like they would be better off with a pure ev rather than carrying around a complete ice setip plus tank of fuel.
It's why plug ins rarely work for normal use, you're either carrying around a heavy battery pack and motor you aren't using or the ice and fuel you aren't using.
Harry Medcalf loved his Range Rover PHEV because they only ever used it for short journeys, almost of all of which were on electric. It's such a face palm moment making an already massively heavy car even heavier when a small EV with a small battery like a Leaf or even a small ICE would be far cheaper to buy and run, while fitting all of their actual requirements.
I get why people like them, as they let you dip your toe into evs but they just don't offer the benefits that a straight ice or straight ev would.
I imagine that when the concept was first dreamt up they were thinking that cities would charge you if you entered using ICE, so the battery is for then and you get to the city using ICE savingyour battery. But that's not happened.
Mass is mass. It has momentum. So a large battery can help you store energy as momentum just by it being heavy.
Yeah, hmm, at some point you have to stop, thats where the momentum or at least some of it is returned to the battety. The return from regen is less than the energy spent to accelerate and overcome friction, in the first place, so you get significant losses of around 20% or more, so not really...
Believe me when I say that there are smart people working out the details to minimize losses. Like. Arguing here doesn't make the cars more or less efficient. It's a thing you can buy already and it's appeal is that it saves fuel. So like unless it were to not actually save fuel, I would say that someone actually did their homework and figured out how to deal with any of theoretical problems such as this one.
What you are describing, for it to be of actual benefit, is at its minimum a perpetual motion device, as that's what a zero loss system would be. Only people working on that also sell snake oil.
Anything less than 100% is a loss, which is going to be larger the heavier the car is due to friction (aero, drive train, and rolling) and extra energy to accelerate, that's basic physics.
Very large batteries, 100kwh or over, solve what should be a medium term problem, they are an expensive dead end as they are often around half the cost of the car's production cost and add . What I really don't like is stupidly large bricks of cars that struggle to even do 3 miles per kwh and then use a massive battery to get around their comically small range, which further lowers their efficency.