More than three-quarters preferred to charge their vehicles at home.

Except it seems that in reality, they [1]don't charge them at all .

Hybrids ought to be the sweet spot at present: they have the capacity to cover most journeys on battery power alone and they're not overburdened with battery weight to compensate for range anxiety in the absence of a sufficiently-dense charging network. But it seems like the buyers find it easier to fill them up at the pump than remember to plug them in at night. In which case, they'd have done better to hang onto their old vehicle for a bit longer.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/27/1090172/the-problem-with-plug-in-hybrids-their-drivers/

Surely it's a lot cheaper to 'fill up' at a plug? So i'm kind of surprised.

But I think the issue is that you can't actually 'fill them' because the battery is so tiny on most hybrids compared to the petrol tank. So the cost doesn't really make much difference, because you can't charge up for a long trip on battery.

If the manufacturers were a little more daring, then they could halve the size of the tank and double (or more) the size of the battery. If the battery has a 150 mile range then it doesn't matter if the tank only has another 150. Stopping every 150 miles for 5 mins to fill a small tank wouldn't be an issue for someone making a long trip, whereas stopping for an hour to charge a battery is.

Also, series hybrids. If you're doing most of the driving on the battery, then you don't want to have the motor coupled to an engine. This also means the engine doesn't have to be coupled to the wheel speeds, so it can be smaller, higher speed, more efficient, and it doubles as an off-grid generator

The thing is, certainly in Europe, the battery is perfectly adequate for most journeys people make. The average British driver drives 18 miles per day. Of course, in reality, there will be a lot of shorter journeys and some that are much longer. It would indeed be far cheaper to do these journeys on electric power, so it's indeed a puzzle why people who've spent the additional money on their new vehicle don't take advantage of it.

It could be habit, it could be that people's garages are so full of stuff that there's no way to get the car close to the charger, it could be they're too lazy to go through the ritual of plugging in the car after every journey. Or it may be they simply don't have a charger at home - I know people who have bought hybrids but could only plug them in at public charging points and in practice never do.

However, car-buying has always defeated economic logic, so I suppose it's futile to look for it now.

I think it's not so much economic logic as the need to satisfy multiple and perhaps conflicting individual requirements.

The thing about car purchase is that it's often at least as much about the message it conveys as the passengers it conveys. It's quite hard to break out the economic cost of meeting the "requirement" from the cost of meeting the "aspiration" - so changes to the technology may not have the weight that we might predict on a purely economic basis.

" The thing is, certainly in Europe, the battery is perfectly adequate for most journeys people make. The average British driver drives 18 miles per day. "

Britain has stuff closer together. I once walked from Ash to Aldershot to Fleet (on a warm sunny day).

Where I live now (rural France), it's 13km to the nearest town with a supermarket and post office, and I commute there daily. It's a little under 30km to the nearest town with a hypermarket and what passes for a shopping mall (not a mall but a lot of shops side by side). It's 40km when I need to get my car serviced. And if I need to go to the préfectoral town for administration reasons then.... I cheat and take the train in.

I'm about to take delivery of an electric voiture sans permis (a Playmobil car, Google it). The nice compact size only has a 60km range, so I went for a car larger than I need and more expensive in order to have an 80km range - so I could actually go places once in a while.

If you've not got scope for a home charger, then I completely understand why you steer clear of BEVs right now. The TCO argument does not yet work for you.

But lots of people could have one. And for the vast majority of those folk, a range of 400km would be just fine for pretty much every journey they ever do. Yes, even the summer trek down to Cornwall if you are possessed of just a modicum of advanced planning.

Hybrid whether plug-in or "self-charging" (a complete misnomer of a term - "100% fossil-fuel powered" would be better) are the Industry's way of transitioning, they are not a a necessary intermediate state for the consumer.

Love that you assume people have garages. Majority of cars are street parked

It would be, if the price of electricity wasn't also going sky-high.

I keep my Outlander charged as, indeed, most of my journeys are less than 24 miles round trip. Not having to pop in to a petrol station most of the time is kind of handy - and city driving will always be more efficient with electric propulsion, as the start-stop really eats the dead dinosaurs[1].

The big fix would be to break the electric/IC performance link. If you did not expect the same performance on petrol, the engine could be smaller and more efficient. The price you would pay is that, say the maximum speed on petrol might be 56mph.

[1] yes, I know, it's sea-creatures really.

Turn the petrol engine into a generator as Nissan has started to do: problem solved.

James May on Top Gear beat them to it with his "Diesel-Electric". IIRC it stank, both as an idea and quite literally, as the diesel fumes migrated into his cabin.

Nissan really ought to know better.

"But it seems like the buyers find it easier to fill them up at the pump than remember to plug them in at night"

Plug them in where at night? For a very large number of people they have no driveway and no on-street charging point anywhere near their property.

This. This here.

If our lords and masters want EV adoption, they need to provide cheap AC charging in the places where people park overnight.

Overnight AC charging is better for the grid (low demand, at a time when there is surplus capacity) better for the batteries (because slow) and cheaper (because AC chargers are cheap and don't require enormous infrastructure.)

All this idea of more and faster DC chargers is distraction. EVs should be charged while their owners sleep and the grid is idle.

I have owned an EV for years, but I wouldn't own one if I couldn't plug in overnight.

One major issue for EV adoption is that the second hand market is crap. The good EVs are commanding high prices and the low priced EVs are junk as either the batteries are kaput (leaf) or they have other major issues.

I've never owned a new car, never owned a lease car and don't want to do either. Let someone else pay for the depreciation and early life failures.

Many fewer than you might think, though they are obviously likely to be concentrated in specific areas, so your local proportion may well be higher than the national average.

But home isn't the only place that you leave the car for long periods:

- Work

- Gym

- Supermarket

- Shops

- Town centre (yeah, I know)

- Cinema/theatre

- I'm sure there are many more

To get 18 miles of range each day you need to add less than 5Wh, which is half an hour of a three phase charger (assuming your car has the appropriate inverter), or 42 minutes at a single phase charger.

You don't need a full battery every day, and you don't need to top up to full every time.

The most important infrastructure is pretty easy to deploy - AC chargers are basically a relay controlled by a couple of safety monitors - there is also some communication regarding the max current available. The massively reduced cost of installation should also feed into substantially reduced cost to charge.

The number of times a year when most people would need a DC charger is very small.

We need to be encouraging workplaces, and car park owners of all strips, to be installing banks of AC chargers. Far more important than the DC infrastructure (which is still needed on/near trunk roads).

It really depends on where you live. European cities are crowded, to a point an US American can't imagine. You can't even really park most of the time, often street dimensions are inherited from times way before cars were invented.

As for home charging, the upper middle classes might have nice individual houses with garages and driveways, but the peons are stuffed in hutches and park on some side street, not necessarily very near their homes. Now the problem is, there are over 100 peons to each suburban McMansion dweller, and those can't really charge an EV even if it was given to them. Next time you order a pizza, ask the delivery person if his job provides a changing facility for his personal EV.

Heh, yeah. My salesperson said that I was not to plug the car into an extension lead.

So we went walkies around the house and I offered him a choice. A dedicated extension lead plugged into where I would otherwise plug the washing machine, or he can figure out how to charge the car from 380V three phase (old sockets, no neutral).

Suddenly "extension lead is fine".

But, yup, I fully agree with the sentiment that for many being able to charge it is the primary impediment, and something that ought to be addressed sooner rather than later.

An appropriate extension cable is fine - but you do actually have to have a decent cable, with a decent plug and socket.

And I'd still recommend not exceeding 10A.

And absolutely do not have it coiled up...

Thanks. It'll be a standard 16A cable good for 3500W (more or less), I think my dinky car's charger is something like 700W?

It's about eight metres from the socket to where the car would be, so a ten metre extension will cater for that and allow me to sling it out the little window in the toilet rather than leaving the back door open. Attached to the back is a hangar that once housed two tractors and a combine. Not mine, sadly, but as you can understand there's plenty of space sheltered from most of the usual weather occurrences.

Hmm, maybe I ought to get a longer (15m?) cord with a waterproof cap like the garden ones, I can then run that up along a roof joist and dangle it in the right place? That's an idea too...

PHEVs got a lot of tax breaks when leased as a company car so this made them very attractive especially in the public sector. A couple of years back I saw an article, might have been el reg, where a load of ex civil service PHEVs came up for auction with the charging cables sealed in the original delivery bag.

Original poster was just sneaking in a link to some shitty subscription crap

Didn't ask me for a subscription, the article was readable without it.

Nor me when I first tried, though it seems to have sprung up now - possibly because it's suddenly being hit with traffic...

The original article I read was in [1]The Guardian which has most of the same information but focuses on the cost.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/may/27/plug-in-hybrid-cars-costing-more-to-refuel-than-lab-tests-suggest

Works fine now, apologies.

I have a PHEV and do quite a few local journeys, for shopping etc., and in most cases I can complete them within the battery range, occasionally seeing it switch to battery a mile or two from home. I always plug it in at home, but never in a public point since that's more expensive than using petrol. I'd say that over the couple of years I've had it I have covered maybe 20% of total mileage on electricity.

Considering the purchase price it will certainly never pay for itself in fuel savings, but that's not why I bought it.

I bought my PHEV 8 years ago for $10k. It has more than paid for itself in fuel savings. Given the IRS business mileage rate and actual operating cost per mile, I'm coming out WAY ahead.

I mostly plug in at home, but sometimes at public chargers, because lots of them around here are free. All the chargers in city parking lots and garages are free, the ones at grocery stores are free.

My next car will be a BEV. I'm just waiting on the price of good used ones to come down.

All the chargers in city parking lots and garages are free, the ones at grocery stores are free.

It was like that in the UK at the start, until the owners of the parking lots and stores realised how much it was costing them, for no significant gains in customer numbers. Now they all require payment, often for the parking and the electricity.

PHEVs are a money pit for taxpayers. The German car industry lobbied for them so that could meet, theoretically at least, emissions targets for their fleet. Generous tax incentives saw them being sold as company cars until the plug (sic) was pulled on that scheme. And those owners who can't charge at home or in the office, won't pay to charge because it's cheaper to burn fuel.

Technically, it's a bad idea to have to fuel systems and two engines as this increases weight, complexity and cost for little marginal utility. Petrol as fuel but with electric motors, now you're talking.

Not all hybrids are battery hybrids though.

No, the sweet spot is batteries without an engine. Having to maintain two drivetrains is not ideal.

I've currently got a PHEV, my next car will be a BEV. I'm just waiting on the price of good used ones to come down, I don't buy new cars.

Range is incredibly important, it's not about "anxiety" it's about not having to stop every few hours to charge. I'm not in Europe, and a typical road trip here is roughly the equivalent of going from one end of Britain to the other.

I absolutely do charge my PHEV, it gets plugged in any time it's in my driveway, it gets plugged in whenever I'm in a public parking lot with free chargers. But I'd much rather only charge and never have to put gas in again.

No, the sweet spot is batteries without an engine. Having to maintain two drivetrains is not ideal.

[1]Toyota's HSD only has a single drive train.

It's two electric motors/generators, the ICE and a planetary gear set (similar to a differential). Mechanically it's simpler than a conventional ICE since there is no gearbox and no clutch. There's also no starter motor or alternator.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Synergy_Drive

Interesting to note that absolutely nothing is mentioned about how "green" EV's might actually not be.

I mean, if solar panels are starting to look [1]a tad more grey than green , then what chance do EVs have outside of the political rhetoric of some biased idiots who want to see us all live in caves ?

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2021/06/21/why-everything-they-said-about-solar---including-that-its-clean-and-cheap---was-wrong/

Overnight charging wouldn't rely on solar.

Nothing is green. Billions of dollars of infrastructure, tooling, materials and machines are never green.

They are *greener* under certain assumptions, that's as far as it goes.

And pushing off the "dirty" bit to a regulated industry on a few sites where treatment and capture can be legislated and done at scale is far better than pushing diesel fumes past primary schools, and this will be true NO MATTER if the final emissions are less or not (and they are less, but obviously never zero).

Fact is the EV is greener locally, and as green nationally as the energy supply used to charge it.

I have solar panels. If I use them to charge an EV (unlikely, to be honest, they will merely help a little), that's better than the entire oil infrastructure and then burning it in children's faces. However, where does my panel come from? China. What's the green credentials of that panel? No idea. They could be melting down orphans for all I know.

The "green" doesn't factor into people's decisions for this, the only green that matters is that in their wallet (as the article says, 2/3rds are more concerned about financial cost than anything else). And, to be fair, that's always going to be that way, and always has been. The most green tech in the world won't take off until I can see a way to save money on it - either by avoiding a tax, having a cheaper car to run, or lowering my electricity bills. Everything else pales in comparison to that type of green.

Fact is, it's not going to be long before EVs are cheaper than cars (whether artificially or not), and running them is already cheaper, and charging at home is cheaper than charging at public stations, and charging at home if you have solar is even cheaper. And that's exactly where everyone is headed.

Unfortunately at this precise moment in time, running a hybrid is actually cheaper once you take into account purchase costs.

> They could be melting down orphans for all I know.

Well at least orphans are renewable!

"pushing diesel fumes past primary schools". This old canard.

It might have been true in the eighties, but it is now true that the air in cities has never been cleaner . Modern Euro-6 diesels are now very clean - low NOx (even for VWs), and low particulates. I was surprised to stand behind a relatively new bus in Manchester a while back and realise I was not being choked by fumes, as they really did not smell that bad.

Data: https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/library/annualreport/viewonline?year=2022_issue_1&jump=5-2#report_pdf

Scroll down to the time-series graphs, and you will see that the levels of NOx and particulates are on a long-term downward trend. And this is way before EV's became prevalent.

Whatever the downward trend, the only way to drop it properly is to stop burning crap on the street and just letting the fumes go.

If exhaust pipes were mandated to feed into the vehicle ventilation system then I suspect people might choose not to burn fuel when they could.

"the air in cities has never been cleaner"

Does not mean it can't be even cleaner, nor does it mean it shouldn't be cleaner.

And are 1000 diesels driving past a school every day cleaner than a power plant 20 miles from any schools?

It's hard to see how any EV vehicle - other than a hybrid - can manage the trip I did last week in a 30-year old Fiat: from Turin to Berlin in 13 hours from start to finish including stops for food, fuel etc. (And all that at better than 42mpg, which I don't grumble at). Incidentally, I did the trip down in two days, stopping overnight at a hotel with a single charging point, which was defective.

On the other hand it's hard to make an argument about catching some of those 7-800 watts per square metre falling out of the sky... unless the environmental costs of converting and storing them exceed the benefits.

A PHEV would have been worse for you. The simple fact is that most PHEV have very poor regenerative braking compared to what is now called the 'self charging hybrid', or what I call 'an actual hybrid'. My OH has a 2000 Honda Insight which can regen at about 6-8kW (it only has a 13kW motor so this is good) and will keep its battery charged no matter how far you drive. At a last resort it will background charge from the engine if its really low.

WTF are you blathering about?

Regen braking on PHEVs is just as good as any non-plugin hybrid. My car was available in two versions, a plug-in and a non-plug-in. The regen braking is EXACTLY the same on both models.

Your comment is bad and you should feel bad.

Lets call it 1200km, over two days, so 600km a day. You would have needed to stop somewhere with a DC charger overnight, and probably one or two 30 minute stops at a DC charger. None of that is difficult or impossible or challenging, just requires more infrastructure.

Google says that without stopping at all, that journey takes 12hr 46m, but I guess they don't count the fahren fahren fahren auf der autobahn.

That's a fairly polemic piece which suffers as a result. Pity, because it does highlight some problems, but pretending nuclear waste is safely stored really undermines the credibilty.

In much of Europe, domestic solar is indeed questionable, but in Africa itself it's a different matter and it's finally seeing increasing adoption: https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2024/06/14/a-remarkable-new-era-begins-in-south-africa – paywalled but I'm sure there are ways around it.

"Range was also a factor, with non-BEV drivers wanting at least 500 km of range,"

500km is 310 miles; most new BEV's can get that range, so they've got what they ask for....

I think the industry jumped the gun on full BEVs at scale gambling that bypassing hybrids was worth the risk. Though given product development timelines it was unlikely they'd manage to time it just right. This backward step will likely only last a few model years before batteries make BEVs better in terms of cost and performance.

This is still something of a win. Pure ICE sales dropped in favor of more fuel efficient vehicles. If these are range-anxious drivers who have high annual mileage, it's a net win. Not as big as if they went full EV, but still a win.

This shouldn't be unsurprising. The first chargers will go where it's easy to build and result in a "lumpy" distribution of chargers. the base demand is established and the network will fill in, but it won't happen over night. Some volume of people will need to pass through those charger deserts and will decide an EV isn't viable.

I fall in that category. I have to make 400+ mile (600km+) round trips through rural areas on a regular basis. I considered an EV but at the time I was buying there were a total of 4 chargers (not stations, 4 chargers) along the most common route, with enough gap between them that it was seriously plausible I could be stuck if one station was completely offline. So I switched from an ICE to a hybrid and went from 27mpg to 45mpg.

I live in a 2-car household and it's likely the next vehicle will be a full EV, with the hybrid either handling long hauls but hopefully the charger network will be built out enough that it spends most of it's time puttering around town at low velocity where it gets even better mileage until it can be replaced with either an even more efficient vehicle or a full EV.

So I switched from an ICE to a hybrid and went from 27mpg to 45mpg.

This is less than what my 8 year old diesel Qashqai does - that don't impress me much.