I assume self charging hybrid which has seen an increase includes mild hybrid which can't drive the car on electric only. And having a quick look, there are hardly any none-mHEV new cars being offered these days.

The ability to drive entirely on electricity isn't the major benefit. Toyota's system can only do it under light loads(*) and typically not for more than a mile. The main benefit comes from giving the ECU more options on how to operate the ICE.

Supplementary power from the electrical system coupled with a CVT means the ECU can keep the ICE at it's most efficient for longer. Toyota's HSD will even increase the load on the ICE beyond what is needed (but as a consequence moving it to a more efficient point on the performance curve) to move the vehicle and store the surplus energy in the battery. You might burn more fuel than is needed to move the vehicle but you're getting more energy out of the fuel being burnt.

For a good hybrid system it's all about the balance. That might actually be a good metaphor for life in general :)

(*)One exception to this applicable at the moment in the UK is that if the ICE is really cold the car will be moved purely on electric even under moderate loads. The ICE will be running with adjusted timing to reduce the warm up time. Even then the ICE will be charging the battery/powering the motor.

Toyota sells the Prius for 27 years now. They have picked up a few tricks in all those years, and it shows.

I've been running the Rav4 Hybrid for the past 7 years and, to me, it's the ideal configuration. It's a full hybrid (like the Prius) with an electric motor driving the front wheels, supported by a petrol engine and generator through the eCVT box; it has a separate electric motor for the rear wheels, when AWD is needed. The Rav4 has plenty of oomph with its 2.5l ICE and is quite brisk for the type of car - nowhere near sport car but a 0-60mph of 8 sec is plenty. The real benefit of this type of hybrid is combining the instant torque of electric with the range of petrol. Two cars ago I had a diesel Rav4, that I really liked (I've driven diesels for a long time as they were a good fit to my driving style). I only changed it when I needed something with more off-road ability, so I had a Hilux (3l diesel) for 6 years.

The old diesel Rav4 used to return 40-45mpg, my Hilux managed to average just over 32mpg - both close to the catalogue ratings. My Rav4 Hybrid manages around 40mpg - 45ish for long runs down the motorways, 50ish around the city, but 35-40 for cross-country on side roads. Overall, it matches the Rav4 diesel on economy - but is far brisker to drive. My driving style has changed a bit as a consequence - no point not using the improved acceleration when it's useful!

I've looked at changing to a plug-in hybrid as a lot of my local driving could be on electric (from a home charger) but the cost to change wouldn't be recouped by any fuel savings in my lifetime (as someone already well into their pension years). All electric is of no use to me - I live in a rural area and nothing in my price range currently has the driving range I need...

Some evidence seems to suggest that these are a bit of a failure, as they are often not plugged in.

This results in it behaving as a (non plug in) hybrid with the weight and cost penalty of a bigger battery and the power converter for the external power connection.

I’ve had 9 different hybrid hire cars for a month at a time this year and only one was any good. The worst, an MG, gave 32 miles range after charging all night and ICE gave about 13mpg due to being underpowered by about 60%, likewise for the rest they’re too heavy and consequently eat brakes and tyres too.

Makes me glad I have stuck with my Nissan Qashqai, I get around 70-84mpg (US) on a run and over 60mpg combined cycle out of it, over 1,100 KM out of a tank on average. Looking at the costs of new electrics and hybrids, I just don't see the economical viability of swapping...

One reason for that in the uk, is they have favourable tax incentives on company schemes, so people have been using it as a cheap way to get a car on the scheme with no intention of charging it.

I have a plug-in hybrid, which I do plug in regularly (proper charger in the garage). It's cheaper to run on domestic electricity, even at normal rates, than on petrol but running it on petrol for longer journeys is much cheaper than using public chargers. Despite the extra weight I still get good fuel consumption figures on pure petrol for long journeys, and of course it's much cheaper for local trips. For my use pattern of mostly 20-50 mile local trips, plus regular 400 mile trips and occasional 2000+ holidays it's almost perfect.

Sadly, when I replace it in a few years I'll probably go back to ICE to avoid the driver "aids" and crappy infotainment systems in all modern cars, including my current one.

Sadly, when I replace it in a few years I'll probably go back to ICE to avoid the driver "aids" and crappy infotainment systems in all modern cars, including my current one.

Yeah that's putting me off as well. At least with my '19 Corolla the aids can be switched off and they stay switched off. With the current models they switch back on at next startup and switching them off requires going through the dashboard menu.

"current models they switch back on at next startup"

Yup, the speeding alarm, lane sway beeper (and nudger) and sat-nav voice guidance all revert to "irritating mode" every time you start the engine.

It should be a trivial software update to make your preferences "sticky", but they probably won't :(

p.s. Another frustration is that they don't give you all the hardcopy manuals, expecting you to read how to "navigate the customer experience" via an app on your phone (which plod won't muchly approve of!).

I read somewhere that the main reason manufacturers are removing "off, and stay off" options for the driver assistance features is that NCAP won't award a 5* rating if that's possible (in much the same way that all models including the base [that no-one ever buys] must have all the safety features for a car to avoid a 0* rating [as recently happened to the Zoe]).

Personally, I could probably get away with one of [1]these (if it were available). And if I needed regularly to travel longer distances, it would still probably be cheaper to have one for local journeys and a conventional ICE vehicle too than an electric vehicle that tries to do everything. Of course that won't be universally true. However, we probably need (needed) to think of lower carbon transport options beyond simply swapping out the traction technology of existing vehicle types.

[1] https://www.mobilize.co.uk/range/duo.html

The fact that to my (obviously culturally biased) eyes most of the look like they fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down is probably not helping.

Oh my gosh, what a surprise that is. This is presented as if it should be a shock. Have you seen how many people don't have their own drives to charge fully electric cars?

>>Have you seen how many people don't have their own drives to charge fully electric cars?

Yup - by here (which means you will know where abouts) most people live in terraced houses and many working families have 2+ vehicles - judging by the number of Range Rover Evoques they aren't short of a bob or two either.... so, viewed by disposable income, locals should be prime targets for fully electric Cowbridge tractors but because no drive, no spendy.

As it happens I have a drive - no Evoque - and don't have a fully (or even PEHV) electric chariot cos I don't have the odd £20-30k lying around to depreciate on my drive.

"As it happens I have a drive"

Is your drive rated for the ground pressure and torque that electric cars produce?

Is the electric utility cable under your road rated for the current that electric cars consume, when you and your neighbours are simultaneously charging them?

How hard do you expect people to accelerate on their drive?

Now, funny you should ask that.

I'm a volunteer first responder. There's a couple of response vehicles used that require special training*: They're all EV's. The Volvo EX40 at @2.5 tonne has a 0-62mph of 4.8 seconds. The driving familiarisation course has the trainer vehicle on a concrete launch pad with a good space in front of it before the crash barrier. I've seen drivers get out of that car shaking and white as a sheet having tried driving forwards for the first time. They very nearly hit the crash barrier, and only avoided that due to the duel controls the vehicle has and a VERY experienced instructor.

So yes, on a standard drive, if you're not familiar with an EV and their acceleration (e208, 0-62 in 8.4 seconds for example, compared to the 1l 208 ICE with a 0-62 of nearly 12 seconds) then it can be something of a shock.

Once you know what you're doing, however: Tends to be less of a problem save for those who like the idea of screeching off their drive like a lunatic (and there's ample examples of that kind out there) who would rip their driveway up (and the road surface, too) due to aggressive acceleration.

It's one problem with EV's - we need to upgrade the road surfaces to handle the higher stresses they create through the higher acceleration combined with their larger mass (aka the torque they produce is a lot higher, combined with the heavier weight means more force being applied to the road surface, which most roads aren't designed to handle, hence the rapid deterioration of road surfaces. See, I remember something from my Civil Engineering days!).

Or... and I'm pretty darn sure I've suggested this before: Put a launch control and/or torque limiter in to keep things to a more sensible pace. But that would just take away one of the EV selling points (Sportscar handling in a town car! Enjoy the rush!. Followed by the crash and ensuing EV fire...)

* I've not touched those yet - only trained as far as moving Ambulances so I can help deploy them - and NOT on blue lights, thanks.

It's very easy in an EV to pull away at lights and junctions and leave just about any dino-juice vehicle for dead, even fancy sports models and supercars (for about a second to a second and a half before their ICE get going and they shoot past me in a roar of noise and indignation).

OTOH, if the conditions aren't perfect, pressing hard on the accelerator from stationary just tends to spin the wheels (there's usually more torque available than they can handle).

Apparently it's about a third and a lot of them are properties in inner cities where the resident is unlikely to need or want a car. That still leaves a lot of properties reliant on on street parking but it's still true to say that most properties in the UK have off street parking.

It's not necessarily about on-street parking. I live in a block of 10 apartments, each of which has an assigned parking space and there are two spares. The apartments are all rented. There is no infrastructure and no way of creating the infrastructure to charge EV's in those parking spaces, even if the landlord was inclined to do so. If you add the households living in similar apartments to the households living in terraced housing with no off-road parking, you are looking at significantly more than a third of households.

"Battery electric vehicles are perceived as expensive compared to their traditionally powered counterparts"

Er, no. Battery electric vehicles *are* more expensive. I would love to own an electric car, but the only thing that makes an electric car look reasonably priced is because their price gets compared against a hybrid with all the bells and whistles. For example, at the cheap end of the market, you *can't* buy a new Ford Fiesta any more, and ICE cars are now quite expensive compared to (say) 5 years ago.

More expensive to buy, yes. Depends if you look at total cost of ownership. Fuel and servicing can be significantly less compared to ICE, so over the course of a few years it balances out. That's before taking tax incentives into consideration too.

Can be is the words.. I can't charge at home, so I'm stuck with very expensive charging costs, and the quote for insurance on an equiv BEV to my mondeo worked out at £2,100 a year more which is a lot to try to make up in servicing costs.

Which is all well and good if you can afford to take the initial financial hit in order to gain the longer term payback. Not everyone is fortunate enough to be in that position.

Fuel can be cheaper if you charge at home, but servicing is a bit of a problem: There's still not that many places that can service an EV (they're still training the people to do that). Yes, there's less moving parts to go wrong, but the increased weight causes some elements to wear out faster. Tyres, for example: They don't last as long and they produce a lot more particulates than an ICE does. Also, because the parts that do wear out need to handle a heavier load, they're more expensive meaning repairs can cost more than the equivalent ICE. So a bit of a mixed bag there.

There's a fair few EV advocates out there reporting on what to expect when moving to an EV. They're trying to manage expectations of drivers making the switch, and those I follow have given warts and all analysis of their costs. And they do give some damn good tips and tricks on how to get the most out of the EV. That they're still advocating for EV's does indicate they're serious on the subject, which is one reason I'm willing to listen to them.

And your tax incentives? A lot of EV's fall foul of the added VED for the more expensive cars, and they can all look forwards to paying VED soon, even if their EV is below that expensive car line (think it's £40,000 as one EV I was looking at was just over that amount and so subject to this VED enhancement). So... yes, EV's need to come down in price. But worse is their depreciation as people looking at 2nd hand are nervous about a car whose drive train (battery) may not last that long, or might be a fire risk. It's something time will settle, but right now, you lose a lot on an EV, and that's another factor that puts people off EVs.

My current diesel gets an average of over 60mpg and on a good run it can top out at over 80mpg. Given the cost of a new car and the running costs, I'd have to drive the new car for 25 years to break even.

I wouldn't even break even, as when I did the numbers for an equiv to my diesel mondeo estate, the insurance alone was £2,100 a year more.

And running the heater as little as possible (only that which is necessary to demist the screen, and yes, it's otherwise brass monkeys), the car gets me to work when it is freezing weather with the same amount of charge that the entire journey there and back would do when it's warmer. Oh, and it struggles with the hills in the cold, just not as nippy.

Summer - three full commutes on one charge.

Autumn - two full commutes on one charge.

Winter - I charge it every night as I don't trust it to manage two commutes, the battery consumption is not linear.

Now, you're probably saying "why not charge it in town?". Well, the charging stations are the wrong type / out of service / require subscribing and giving bank info to some sort of app.

I like the concept. Not so keen on the implementation. It would be fine if I lived in a city, but out rural I need a car I can depend upon and my available travel distance being isn't that. I think I'll be back to an ICE for my next car.

Our car is coming up on 10 years old. 3 years ago I was looking at replacing it with an electric car. But now, I'm looking at running it into the ground instead.

Doing the calculations, if I bought a new petrol or electric car today, I'd have to run it for at least the next 25 years, before it would reach the breakeven point. With a change of job location (10 minutes by bike from home), I am no longer doing the kilometers to warrant driving a car. I'm pretty much just using it for the weekly shop and picking up large packages I have delivered to work and my wife uses it to take our grandkids swimming and the odd day out. The rest of the time we are riding to work and walking or taking the train or bus.

Once this car dies, I'll probably look at car sharing and rentals going forward. What is the point of having several thousand Euros invested in a hunk of metal that spends all week sitting on the driveway rusting away? I could rent an awful lot of cars or use taxis for bringing the shopping home, before I even get close to the cost of a new car...

Well, duh. The "Umweltbonus" was droppen iirc in december 2023. That made the decision pro BEV a bit harder, who would have guessed.

I keep looking.

I like Ford.

Ford do not have a single model of electric vehicle that "starts at" significantly under £40,000 (including their new re-released Ford Capri which is not a name I'd be resurrecting if I were Ford). Even the Ford Mustang Mach-E is only £45k, but you want £40k for a basic car?

By comparison, the Mondeo hybrid - which has the exact same chassis and interior etc. as my Mondeo Mk5 ICE car - was panned as the worst electric hybrid ever. How can you go so wrong that you can't even just change the drivetrain in a popular model without turning it from one of Clarkson's [1] favourite cars to a trash heap?

They don't care, and they've just sacked another few hundred workers and closed sites because of "poor electric vehicle sales". I wonder why.

My dad, a lifelong motor mechanic / petrol head has hit retirement and his Volvo 740 (300k miles!) was retired with him. He bought a cheap Dacia hybrid, and he keeps encouraging me to do the same. If you've lost THAT audience too, to a cheap Romanian brand now owned by Renault (and my dad HATES ALL FRENCH CARS)... wow... I mean... come on.

Western ICE car manufacturers are ekeing out every ounce of their tooling, factories, patents and parts and they will not change until the market is absolutely dead. They have no interest, even though they could sell a reasonable electric vehicle right now if they wanted to. I can only imagine that, like Ford - and like many Fords! - this will backfire over time.

I'm in the market for a car, and I would absolutely go all-electric (desperate to do so - I have solar installs, perfect place for a charging point, etc.). But there's nothing there of enticement to me. I'll keep the Mondeo another year, and another, and another, until it's untenable to keep running.

I spent £22k - brand new from Ford - on the Mondeo 9 years ago. It's been great. For TWICE THAT PRICE I still can't buy something comparable and electric from Ford. And I'd struggle to get something even vaguely comparable from most Western manufacturers, in fact. I eyed up the MG offerings, which are the closest I can get, but still everything is tiny or hybrid.

If my car died tomorrow, I'd probably just buy an electric car. But at this rate, it'll be some cheap, tiny Chinese model because nothing else is enticing at all.

Nobody is "shunning" electric cars. You're literally not offering anything vaguely attractive because you want to sell your ICEs.

[1] I hate Clarkson, but I presume he knows something about cars at least.

Re the Mondeo hybrid, if I heard correctly it has a built-in timer for the battery to expire, not based on condition but just elapsed mileage.

So it has a hardcoded lifespan 'just because'.

Apparently with the right tools you can reset it but why should you have to? That's just bad engineering.

"That's just bad engineering."

Only from the customer's PoV. And who cares about customers these days?

That question, of course, is at the heart of this discussion and others, e.g. AI PCs. Nobody cares about customers so customers have given up caring about vendors.

The Mondeo Mk4 was a great car. For the Mk5 they cut corners and moved production from Belgium to Spain, the Mk5 was ok, but flimsier (try the door slam test) and more plastic-y. It didn't sell as well, so Ford seems to have assumed that nobody wants that sort of car, and they dropped it. I replaced my Mk4 with an Audi A5, probably the best car I've ever owned. The new A5s, built on VW's common platform are acquiring a very poor reputation for reliability. No wonder people are going for cheap Chinese and Romanian cars, they're better.

I don't know how much this can be applied to anyone else, but, for me at least, a significant deterrent is all the news about major improvements to EVs that are in the lab, or hitting production lines, or trickling down from high-end models. Things like solid state batteries, otherwise better batteries, working V2G, or even the plausibility of lower prices as scale picks up. Not all of this is going to pan out, but some of it will. And there's the infrastructure; the number of charging points might grow faster or slower, but it's not going to go down.

All of this tells me, if you like the idea of an EV - hold out for a while longer, and you might get a substantially better one. Or, same thing from another point of view, get an EV right now and you might see its resale value plummet as the next generation is much better and/or relatively cheaper.

ICEs, on the other hand, are as good as they're going to get.

Most people who can realistically operate with an EV - own drive for charging, wealthy (to afford the purchase) and not a "road warrior" - have already got one, to cash in on the tax and other incentives offered by government subsidies (money transfers from the poor to the rich, whodathunkit!). To the amazement of nobody at all, the bottom then drops out of the new EV market.

As someone with a Nissan Leaf with a CHAdeMO charger connection, I would suggest that if you are in the market, then get something with a CCS (type 2) connector. There are just so many more of them about!

While electric vehicles will probably one day be the norm, the technology just isn't there yet apart from a few special cases such as buses which spend their day running relatively short city routes and can return to the depot overnight for charging. For most people the main problems are

Range - until you can do a few hundred miles on one charge people aren't going to replace their petrol/diesel cars

Recharge time - they might be able to get away with 5-10 minutes to recharge when you pull in on your way somewhere, but not much longer than that.

Recharge availability - I live near the centre of a medium-sized city and there's only a tiny handful of available recharge points. I can't recharge at home since I only have on-street parking; if I had an electric vehicle I'd have to run a cable out of my lounge window and across the pavement to it.

Battery pack lifetime

EVs in Europe are £40k+ because that's how much it really costs to make an EV, and make a modest profit.

The ones you get for £25k are not made in Europe, as the manufacturers have access to cheap raw materials, cheap energy, and cheap labour.

So, do you want a cheap EV, or would you rather your fellow Europeans had a job?

So, do you want a cheap EV, or would you rather your fellow Europeans had a job?

Emotional blackmail only works if the choice is a close one. With the difference in price between the European EVs and 'the cheap ones' it has no hope and people will actually be choosing between cheap EV/similar priced hybrid

The only attractive EV option at present is a milk float.

Thinks ... Father Ted episode ...