It’s ironic that the article gives the perfect argument against itself:
In the US, nearly all driving trips are less than 50 miles
Which means that EREVs are, in fact, used as electric vehicles for “nearly all driving trips”.
It’s as if the article is ignoring that EREVs run off the battery first and have a (fairly efficient) gas generator as backup. Plus China-blaming, plus saying “the Ukraine” (by now, you should know better).
Yep. If I didn’t say similar a few days ago on another post, then I probably had a comment half-typed where I meant to.
EREV’s are just the series-hybrids we’ve had for years that were supposed to be stepping stones to EVs. Now that EVs are finally starting to take off, re-branding hybrids as some new kind of EV is, at best, moving the goalposts, and at worst sabotaging wider EV adoption.
Isn’t that just a plug in hybrid?
The key point of EREV is that it runs like an EV, entirely off the battery, until the battery runs out, then it uses the gasoline generator to keep the battery charged at some minimal level.
However, there were several plug-in hybrids that couldn’t really function as pure EVs, or had abysmal range. IIRC: Ford Fusion Energi with ~13 mi of range, or 2013 PHEV Prius, several luxury SUVs and sports cars (BMW i9?)
Insert countercomment about living 200 miles from the nearest town and needing a car with 500mi range in winter
You still can’t really do a road trip without stopping for 30 minutes every two hours, and being extremely aware of where the next plug is.
Unfortunately, gasoline is much more energy dense than even the best ev batteries.
Exactly. It’s why I can’t really go full ev. Well, that and the bullshit privacy invasion of all new cars.
I could get by with one in town, but it would not work long term because there’s just too many hours long drives I have to make on a regular basis, and pretty regular trips into other states far enough away that until the infrastructure is way better, there’s just nowhere to charge yet.
And the non-interoperable app bullshit with chargers. ChargePoint, Blink, EVgo, whatever else requires me to make an account, deposit some minimum amount of money (that just sits there afterwards), and only then charge, if the app or the charger works. (E.g: ChargePoint had chargers that can be used with their RFID card but not through the app)
Let me swipe my credit card. It’s what it’s for.
The car companies have been dragging their feet on this since forever. They will continue to do so.
