I would have to stop once for 10-15 min to cover that 400-mile round trip in my EV (Hyundai Ioniq 5). I've driven 900-mile days, in the winter, through snow, without issue, in the same car. It takes marginally longer.

> It also performs far better than any EVs or ICEs I’ve seen anywhere close to its price point.

My own anecdote is that I vastly prefer driving an EV on road trips. The lack of noise and gear shifts, regen braking, etc., all make it a much less draining experience.

> This “everyone should just have an EV” thing really reads like a modern “let them eat cake.”

This is a very different story for countries that don't have high import tariffs on Chinese vehicles. EVs there are fast becoming the cheaper option.

I agree it's a bit privileged to expect people to start converting over to EVs wholesale, especially with the current political climate that's disincentivizing new EV production and charger networks. Moreover, as others point out, if you can't charge at home, the math and logistics stop being quite so favorable towards EVs.

However, as someone who made the jump to an EV a few years ago, if you can manage it it's more reasonable than a lot of people think. I too live in the Triangle of NC, and my current EV cheerfully gets me to the beach every year and up to visit family in Virginia without breaking a sweat. This year, I used ABRP (A Better Route Planner app) to plot out the beach drive and it was as smooth an experience as I've had making that trip. Yes, we had to stop for a charge (because I hadn't charged fully before we left), but I had the chance to grab a snack and stretch my legs for fifteen or twenty before setting out again, so I honestly didn't mind. A lot depends on where people need to go, but thus far I haven't found a lot of places where the chargers are so sparse I really had to worry about it.

I don’t commute and I use the EV almost exclusively for trips, including a few countries over, but my EV also isn’t replacing the unique US model of “I spend half my waking hours driving a tank around 3rd world charging infrastructure”, so I can’t relate to some of the answers here.

> Just a normal weekend trip to the beach or mountains (200-ish miles from the Triangle of NC either way) would mean I’d have to limit myself to hotels/Airbnbs with a charger.

I bought an EV just under a year ago and because I park literally right next to my electrical panel I figured I'd probably end up installing a 40 amp EVSE within a few weeks. Here we are, again nearly a year later, and I'm still using the standard 120v L1 cable the car came with because it's plenty. The only time I'm getting below 50% are on road trips where fast chargers are easy to come by.

As a matter of fact the last two vacation rental homes I've stayed in have been in North Carolina, one on Topsail Beach and one near Black Mountain. The one near Black Mountain actually had a 14-50 outlet outside intended for RVs or EV charging but both had plenty of 5-20s outside where I could have easily plugged in my portable cord to easily cover the driving we did in the area, and even if they didn't with 240ish miles of range and a variety of fast chargers in the nearest decent size city 10-15 miles away it's not really a concern.

There is a zero hassle to find a charger for most EVs. The car tells you where to go, it is generally built into the navigation. You would not need to limit yourself to places to stay with a charger.

> It also performs far better than any EVs or ICEs I’ve seen anywhere close to its price point.

Curious what you're using for comparison for "performs better." There are lots of 300-400+ HP EVs when you consider the cost of a RAV4 Prime ($41.5K-$50K USD)

Im curious how common a 200mile weekend trip actually is. Its been years since Ive driven even 100miles in a single trip

If you're in the city a car shouldn't even be a major consideration (ideally).

In Tokyo however you have literally one of the best Public Transit systems in the world. So why buy car?

   > robotic garages are everywhere

Unlike bumfuck nowhere, Tokyo offers decent public transportation. Right?

What EV? I have a 2020 Model 3 and in six years I've never had an issue with charging, even when driving around rural Montana & Idaho in the winter. I've never had a supercharging station be out of commission. Sometimes an individual stall or small group of stalls will be offline, but the car tells you which ones are broken so you don't waste time trying to charge at one.

As others have noted, you have a very low range EV. It's really not what anyone is suggesting now.

A cheap diesel/gasoline generator might do like 5kW, which is enough for overnight charging but not for range extension or powering the wheels. There were several pretty good range extended EVs (plugin hybrid with larger battery and smaller engine), like the Volt and BMW i3, those had small engines that mainly acted as generators for the battery, but with enough horsepower to at least keep you rolling on the highway. A $300 modular generator ain't quite gonna cut it.

I believe there's also a bunch of Chinese vehicles with similar design, entirely electric drivetrain with gas generators for range extension. Most of these will need to kick in before the battery is empty so that there's some stored energy buffer available for acceleration.

> for rare needs of longer range.

Hmm. Supposing we need a 6 hour drive at 20 kWh per hour (eschewing specific speed/distance figures), and a generous "smaller battery pack" can provide 3 hours (60 kWh). Then the generator must supply the missing 60 kWh during the 6 hour interval, i.e. a 10 kW generator.

Google says those cost from 1k to 5k USD, and they seem rather beefy.

(Just doing the math out of curiosity, otherwise agree with you.)

> swappable $300 generator

It's never that simple, but it could be. Modular standard parts that could be installed on a standard chassis design would be great. So have a small generator or an additional battery, maybe even a fuel cell. Probably never happen but it would be the nirvana of car design. Standardization would drive scale and it could work really well. That approach did wonders for the PC industry.

Why not towable gas generator trailers that you can rent for long trips.

Hook it on, plug the connector up and attach your license plate to the back (or use eink).

You might be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended-range_electric_vehicl...

It's not exactly what you're describing, but I think it will become more common as battery technology growth slows down.

I’m not sure why you’d offer a drop in option if you can just build it into the car. Extended-range electric vehicle (EREV) / Range Extender Electric Vehicle (REEV) do exist on the market already.

A more practical solution is to just rent out a small generator on a trailer.

Unless I’ve completely misunderstood what you’re getting at.

The bmw i3 range extender engine only generates 19kw of electricity. It doesn't allow you to "fill up and drive anywhere" like a car. It is more like a bigger battery.

I think the solution is actually what we have now - high-power dc fast chargers spread around the country.

Basically a modular trunk add-on, with an air and exhaust pipe?

Is the hybrid car then just a social cover for “I want gas savings, but where I live doesn’t have EVSEs?”

It almost reminds me of mechanical alarm clocks from the 70s, where they are designed to look like an electronic model but are just driven by AC motors (1).

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zWqweWjsbU

I thought this but after 3 years I can say it is unfounded. the only reason I ever think about my state of charge on the city is when I need it to be low so I can use street parking that requires me to charge.

Are they though? I mean you also don't have a gas station at the curb but you get by. Maybe you just need to charge at a public charging point. Just because you have an EV doesn't mean you absolute NEED to charge at home for it to make sense.

Driving hybrid still burns gas, generating CO2 which is destroying the world. Why would anyone pick it when EVs are available is beyond me.

Typically the driving distances are pretty short in a city, so you don't have to charge that often.

The smaller size of an EV would be more useful in most European cities, at least.

Funnily enough, I’m a city dweller with street parking.

Plenty of people in Seattle just run the charging cable from the house across the sidewalk with one of those little ramps over it. And we've got a whole bunch of chargers on electricity poles, they are starting to proliferate around neighborhoods.

So the public pays for your car storage?

Charging at home is a nice bonus.

This isn't born out in the data, non-plugin hybrids are more reliable than ICE according to Consumer Reports.

> Hybrids, which combine a gas engine, electric motor, and battery, have 15 percent fewer problems on average than gas-only cars.

> EVs and PHEVs have about 80 percent more problems on average than gas-only cars.

A lot of EV/PHEV problems likely come down to them being much newer designs with issues that still need to be to work out, but hybrid vs. ICE is pretty clear. The e-CVTs, HV accessories, and simpler, less-stressed engines (no turbos which are quite common in efficiency focused ICE) enabled by hybrid drive-trains are big boons for reliability.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-s...

Anecdotally, I've never heard this. I have an American hybrid from 10+ years ago with 90K miles and it's been super reliable. (Knock on wood...)

Given that you only really need 240 volts (or maybe 3 phase longer term), I don't see why every parking space, street, public and private can't have a power socket.

It's already happening in some places, maybe one day it'll be mandated.

What do you spend the additional hour on? Charging for the ENTIRE 2hr trip, starting with an empty car, would take less than 30 minutes in my very average EV. A quick boost good enough for 100km (60mi) at 130 km/h (80mph) takes about 9 minutes. 1 hour of cumulative charging (well spaced) gets me about 750km (466mi) of range. Starting with a charged car gets me well into "fuck it I'm not driving that far in one day" numbers, still on one hour of charging.

How badly has that pack degraded if you have to charge after 2 hours? We have a 2021 Tesla Y and can drive for 4 hours before needing to charge--assuming we start fully charged. The math doesn't seem to be mathing here.

Something has to be very wrong if you're charging at all on a three hour trip, or taking an hour to charge. Do you have one of those mythical Canada-only stripper models that Tesla created as a dodge around regulations? One of those with a degraded battery is about the only way you can find yourself with a range barely over 100 miles.

I just recently did a 422 mile trip. Needed one 11 minute recharging stop.

OP is leaving something out of this story, because a 2hr trip is around ~130 miles. An EV with "300 mile" range can fairly reliably do 260 miles, and worse case, a quick 5 minute fast charge can get you the rest of the way home.

Part of the difficulty in understanding the problem for others is that they simply don't drive very far, very often. Our pickup has a range of over 750 miles with a full tank. It's not unusual for the tank to have to be filled two days back to back: my wife drives a lot. When you're driving that much, the last thing you want to do is stop if you don't have to.

> A 2 hr trip becoming a three hour trip only has to happen to you once a week for a few weeks before you realize the limitations.

Even if you’re driving at 80, that’s a 160 mile trip. What Tesla does your gf have? What’s the range?

> so the impressive ~100 MPG figures are actually worse than ICE.

If you have a specific example of a hybrid that gets worse mileage than a comparable non-hybrid ICE I'd love to hear it, because that directly contradicts my lived experience.

At various times, I've owned a 2003 Prius and a 2012 Honda Fit. The Prius was larger, had better acceleration and routinely got nearly twice the MPG of the Fit.

That was ~20 years ago; I believe newer models of Prius use different battery chemistries. On the occasions when I've driven a newer model, it got better mileage than what I experienced back then.

Compared the old 2020 Leaf the current model has around 387 mile range, which I think is enough that I wouldn't worry about range.

They also charge a lot faster now it's using a CCS connector.

There's plenty of other models providing that range too such as Renault Scenic.

I don't think hybrids are worth the extra complexity at all now. All those little moving engine parts are going to wear out sooner or later.

ps Is it bad that I still laugh at calling a place "bumfuck"?

The UK has the most ridiculously powerful municipal governments I've ever seen. There's a reason you guys are falling so far behind, it sucks.

I personally do understand how Toyota’s hybrid drivetrain works, I’ve driven it a lot, seen the consumption figures and I think it’s a great technology. Still, seeing how well my EV works on any kind of trip (5km to 750km), a hybrid Corolla simply doesn’t offer anything that I’d want.

Round here Toyotas almost immediately took over the taxi market. They're ideal for that use case: high milage, but stop/start in cities. Not seen many pure EV taxis yet apart from the occasional Tesla.

BEV deployment seems to be following fixed infrastructure. In Europe you can see it spreading out from Norway. Various mundane factors like "do I know there's charge points near where I go" and "does anyone I know drive an EV" affect adoption. That's why I quite like the UK green number plate stripe, it's a near costless bit of official EV promotion.

I don't use my car daily (thanks subway), only for rare monthly trips, 400km one way. How does hybrid helps here? it just adds weight for no reason

Hybrids are more expensive

Same here. I'm on my 2nd EV, and will be getting my 3rd soon. Driving an ICE car would feel like using an old flip phone instead of a smartphone.

But for my daughter, she will be off to college soon. You can't guarantee apartments will have chargers. And the school she'll mostly likely go to is close enough to drive to/from, but far enough that it would need at least 2, maybe 3, recharges for an EV. It just isn't practical.

An EV isn't right for every scenario, even if for many it is.

Increasingly, apartment buildings have chargers. And they don't need charging at home if they can charge during class.

I don’t consider that an edge case, that’s just another person who can’t charge at home. A huge percentage of people will never be able to charge an EV at home. People associate EVs with home charging because that’s why the early adopters would get them, but it’s not supposed to be a prerequisite for owning one.

It's one of those cities where owning a car should be a nightmare by design in the first place.

In NYC you shouldn't own a car.

We bought an EV 1.5 years ago. Yes, hearing gas vehicles start up around you is definitely a thing, although where I am I think it's mostly not hybrids but cars equipped with start/stop feature that shuts off the engine at stop lights. You can also hear if someone punches the throttle around you - even at freeway speeds you'll hear their engine rev up as the transmission shifts, and if you want to you can put your foot down and accelerate before all that shifting is done and before they've even begun to accelerate.

Regarding fuel costs - it's much cheaper to operate our EV than a comparable hybrid but this absolutely relies on access to a home charger and is dependent on local gas and electricity prices. A comparable hybrid might get 35 mpg, we get around 2.5 miles/kWh (these are minivans) - and so our breakeven point in electricity cost (using $4.50/gallon gas cost) is $0.32/kWh. In my area, electricity is fairly cheap, around $0.14/kWh and I use a plan that lets me pay $0.07/kWh at night when I charge. That's offset by me paying slightly more for other things in the day so my effective cost might be closer to $0.10/kWh, which is still 1/3 of the breakeven point. On long road trips I will likely pay above that but that only happens a few times a year.

Our experience on long highway trips, which practically tend to be repeated cycles of 2 hours of driving and 20 minutes of charging is that they have been more comfortable and we felt better at the end of the trip despite it taking longer door-to-door. This is based on a couple 1400 mile round trips, one w/ 2 people in the vehicle and another w/ 4 and a full load of stuff.

The EV experience is superior to ICE or hybrid. Smooth, silent, quick, you can run the A/C in your garage w/o stinking up the place. The flip side to range anxiety (which is a real thing at first but goes away) is that our EV is always ready to go in the morning and I never end up smelling like gasoline. Yes, my lawn mower is battery powered too.

Given how Americans have not prioritized running costs in vehicle purchases in the past and trucks/SUVs heavily outsell cheap economy cars, I think as more folks see how good the experience is, they'll buy EVs over gas cars even without understanding the math above.

I grew up in a low-income family in an ex-Eastern bloc country. My $32k EV is the only new car anyone in my extended family has ever bought.

Just buy the $48k Model Y instead of the $25k Corolla Hybrid, what's the big deal?

How much does public charging cost where you live?

You disagree, but my post doesn't say anything about city trips..? I use public transport in the city. I use the car to visit family in the countryside (about 100 km away) and to go on trips and vacations. The EV works beautifully for all that.

I imagine one needs a car when living in the US.

Try public transport or a bike in a city in south america and come back to talk about your experience

I don’t see why the future shouldn’t be bike + public transport + EV. That’s what I’m personally going for. In fact, unless EVs disappear from the market for some reason, I will never buy an ICE car again.

I really think relying on public chargers isn't a problem for hundreds of millions of people all over the world and I'd like people to consider getting an EV as their next car.

sure but also you need to be an apt dweller wo home charging options AND have enough of a daily drive that you need to charge that much.

it would be interesting to correlate apartment dwellers with their weekly commute miles.

we could come up with the number that range needs to get to so that the majority of people could only need to charge once a week. I bet current mid-range evs cover a surprising amount of people. Just guessing but i bet the number is like 280miles a week in metro areas.

Then it's probably not really a big deal to find a public charger somewhere you'd be spending the hour or so anyway. you dont see any newish shopping center these days wo a bank or two of chargers but also lots of parks, libraries and other places youd go that dont cost money have chargers now too.

It feels like its worse, maybe not as "convenient" as going to a gas station but also gas stations are pretty terrible places. smelly with who-knows-what fumes, usually pretty grimy, requires handling of toxic chemicals. Its faster but all things considered i dont think its remotely a "better" way to do it.

I am exactly that and I’m not leaving myself out.

Glad you discovered the gem he is! What made me appreciate his expertise first? Most people use a dish washer wrong. His video will break it all down to help one understand how to use the typical dish washer in the right practical ways in which it was engineered.

One of the best channels on YouTube.

You will not be disappointed if you like dishwashers!

TFA is exactly that...

I think it's also because EREVs need a performant generator that isn't much different from the drive motor. So you'll have a full ICE+EV drivetrain on top of an EV as its battery for it to work, which is not ideal.

Compared to that, other hybrid systems like the motor-clutch combo packs that sit between the ICE and gearbox, as well as the fixed gear Toyota systems, can have motors that are weaker, lighter, and cheaper than the ICE, while being able to be additive to the ICE power output. That makes more efficient use of steel and copper than full serial setups.

BMW i3 had such EREV option, but it apparently used a cheap OEM bike engine(not like a BMW Motorrad engine) and also could not overcome power draw of the EV drive motor. So it literally just extended the range, not allowing it to run indefinitely at highway speeds with just refueling. Nissan e-POWER system is powerful enough to do that, but then the readers of comment will have to back to the line 3.

That is exactly what ePOWER is, that configuration is called a series hybrid and is more commonly seen in heavy industry like diesel trains or trucks in the mines (for better or worse).

More recently effort is also going into series hybrids for public road haulers, which I personally think is a great application for it since you can potentially put a lot of the equipment into a hot-swappable dolly.

I drove a Nissan Note (Nismo esition) with ePower and it could happily spin the wheels when taking off, not something you normally get out of a tiny economy hatchback. I think it has 140kw electric drivetrain? 140kw is pretty sporty when delivered instantly.

Range extender EVs made a lot more sense a decade a go when batteries were much more expensive, and fast chargers were not yet ubiquitous. Then range extenders were more affordable than EVs and could go to places EVs couldn't.

Now these EREVs are mostly luxury niche of big cars (where extra space taken by two power trains doesn't matter) for people who don't want to spend 20 minutes at rapid chargers on that yearly long trip they do. Or for people who live in some global warming ignoring backwater[1] that hasn't built out rapid charger yet.

[1] even China has ubiquitous fast charging network now

What you are referring to is usually referred to as an EREV (Extended Range Electrical Vehicle). The reason legacy manufacturers market their less efficient plugin hybrid and non plugin hybrids (100% of the power comes from petrol) instead is because that's what they have and want to milk for as long as possible. In terms of drive train these are more complex to manufacture and more costly to maintain than an EREV. EREVs typically have slightly larger batteries than a typical PHEV as well. Typical electrical ranges are at least 80-100 miles or more in some cases. Usually the cars are available as without the range extender as well. This is less common for PHEVs and hybrids. Though of course some legacy manufacturers are still trying to push compromise cars. Like Nissan in this case.

Nissan has been really struggling for the last few years, this new hybrid engine doesn't look like it will turn things around for them to me.

EREVs are an idea that is not new and also relevant in shipping and aviation. Many modern large ships (oil tankers, cruise ships, etc.) are already EREVs effectively: an electrical motor drives the propeller and a generator powers the motor.

And there are are a few plane designs that are using small batteries + generators to power flight. It makes a lot of sense: electrical motors are a lot simpler, lighter and cheaper to maintain. Engine maintenance is very costly in aviation. And so is fuel. The recently announced X1 is a good example of a plane that does this. There are a few other manufacturers working on this as well. Early days but the potentially large fuel savings probably ensure this is going to happen one way or another.

There were several of them: the first and second generations of Chevy Volt, Fisker Karma, BMW i3, and a couple of Chinese brands.

They're less efficient than parallel hybrids at high speeds (on a freeway). And you also need a fairly sizeable engine to keep up with the consumption at freeway speed, so at this point you might as well just throw in a planetary gearbox.

There’s a lot of good replies here but I’ll add mine too:

The simples reason is this. What you’re describing is having a gas motor spin a thing (the generator) -> charge battery -> discharge battery -> spin a thing (the wheels) to make car go. Each of those steps has efficiency losses.

That’s why most hybrids are parallel hybrids, where both the gas engine and the battery+motors can spin the wheels more or less directly, even at the same time.

you still basically get the engine spinning at a more constant rpm, and the battery kicks in for acceleration (and charges on deceleration), and now highway cruising doesn’t have any lossy conversion steps, while acceleration and braking uses the advantages of the electric drive chain.

Just a note: the Technology Connections video above goes over why this doesn't work well for cars (but does for train locomotives).

Chevrolet Volt (2011) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended-range_electric_vehicl...

Ford and Ram are both doing this with their next generation electric pickups. Range and towing on pure electric was deemed too compromised.

https://www.motortrend.com/features/what-is-an-erev-extended...

Not for cars, but Edison Motors in Canada seems to be going this route right now for their heavy duty trucks and heavy-duty pickup truck conversions.

Disclosure: I have a small investment in them.

The above comment’s video explains why.

You lose energy converting the the gas power to electrical power to mechanical power. Constant RPM doesn’t matter as much as you think.

That's pretty much how the Chevy Volt worked. It was an incredibly good system in that car and GM did their usual thing and killed it

It seems to me you’re talking about a range extender, which lots of Chinese EV makers use. Many do buy them but sometimes you get the worst of both worlds: weighty like an EV and the heat, vibration, exhaust of a petro car. For most people the extended range is only needed very occasionally but you have to carry the ICE system the whole time.

The original/first BMW i3 (2013) was like this, full battery electric (with an admittedly small battery 80-160 miles range depending on model), with an "range extender" engine.

Personally I'm a big fan of the EREV (which only drives an alternator, rather than a PHEV which drives the wheels directly) due to the simpler mechanical design - however I'm not sure if it's a personal preference. I feel even a fairly small 30kw (40hp?) would make a huge difference to the utility of the vehicle, while still being small and economical.

You may be interested to read / watch videos of Audi's RS Q e-tron they raced in the Dakar Rally and even won with this type of powertrain - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_RS_Q_e-tron

You mean like a BMW i3 with a range extender? Little two-cylinder petrol that just spins a genny.

They work, they're not terribly efficient in terms of converting fuel to distance travelled, and really batteries are getting so good these days there's little point any more.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fi...

BMW i3 with REX came out in 2013

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_i3_(hatchback)

Honda's current hybrid system and this e-POWER both work this way mostly

bmw I3s were this type of hybrid as far as I remember.

the ICE extender was an option.

Theoretically couldn't you take an electric car and put an off-the-shelf generator in your frunk and wire it up to charge the battery as you drive?

Already a big push with this. They call them EREV now, extended range electric vehicles.

Edison in Canada is doing diesel electric hybrid trucks

Isn’t that how diesel trains operate?

The concept is called range extenders, and the video does explain why it’s one of those false great ideas and every production vehicle has failed: EVs with range extenders are at best bad EVs and at worst terrible hybrids.

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Aka EREV, thats becoming majority of “PHEVs” now.

Yes, but it doesn't mean the overall system is better because of losses during the power conversion. It's usually better to have the engine driving the wheels directly which is possible with a continuously-variable transmission (CVT).

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Now add a gas-powered range extender to that Bolt EV and it could easily be the only car that a person would have to own, subsisting just fine on 120vac charging most of the time and requiring a top off of fuel any time an unexpected errand comes up or a road trip is tendered.

We had the X-Trail AWD version of this. The plus side was getting around 850km to a tank of petrol. However, the EV-only range was very poor and the engine was quite harsh sounding when it spun up. Super happy to get rid of it and switch to BEV.

> it isn't recognised at all as hybrid vehicle in Germany

You surely mean that it is not recognized as plug-in hybrid vehicle.

>X-Trail e-Power AWD a while ago, and fuel economy, while not spectacular, was still great

10L/100km on highway, worse than cheaper comparably powerful ordinary diesel. Seems like a pointless car, X-Trail 2.0 dCi M9R was better in every possible way.

I am always a bit confused by this argument. You have to drive to a gas station to get fuel but it's not okay to drive to a specific place to charge. Most of the gas station where I live already have a few charging points backed by a big battery. Maybe that's not everywhere but I am not sure they are as rare as they are made out to be.

> EV charging in mechanical parking system is still an unsolved problem

I'm not familiar with this; don't you just plug it in?

50-60 miles per U.K. gallon. Or 11-13 miles per litre.

20 miles per us gallon is terrible, but it’s more like 25 miles per U.K. gallon, which isn’t much below what by 1984 Nissan mid sized car used to get 27 years ago.

I tend to use 45mpg/10mpl now, as both my old micra and my newer Skoda got about that. That’s about 37mpg (us).

Not OP, but I'm going to guess:

- Nissan's petrol engine is the crossbow, a well optimised generator for onboard battery

- Every other brand's EV is the machine gun. About 4 times as energy efficient as a petrol car when you take into account the lifecycle of the vehicle, so probably more when you talk about a hybrid car.

I think they mean they're polishing a turd.

Why bother going to all this effort for an internal combustion engine (crossbow)? Why not spend that money researching 100% EV (machinegun) drive trains?

Its pretty obvious where the future is headed for personal vehicles (yes yes yes I am sure I will get loads of responses where people need to drive 750 miles a day non-stop every day, both ways, towing a boat, up a mountain etc).

It surprises me that these manufacturers like Nissan and Toyota and Honda seem incapable of reacting and changing their product line-up. You can get 100% EV porsches, mercedes, BMWs - hell even Range Rover now and yet these guys are dithering and have basically got only very very half-hearted efforts in EV offerings while apparently trying to pretend its not happening and relying on hybrids.

Meanwhile, at least here in London, I am seeing more and more and more EV BYDs & Jaecoos & MGs etc... so if you care about outward appearances you buy the merc/porsche/etc EV, if you just need a car and don't care what people think you buy the cheap & decent Chinese EV. Toyota, Honda et al don't compete at the luxury end, and they've got nothing to compete with against Chinese EV brands who seem to be taking over the lower end where Toyotas and Nissans etc used to be popular.

Your point? In some countries it's easier to get a cross bow.

The trick in this scenario is the fact that you can run it at a constant RPM + load for a reasonably long duration. The cost of warming up a recuperator and other masses is amortized across a dependable schedule each time. The controller can ensure that the turbine (assuming the drive is long enough) will run for a minimum duration given a certain battery charge level.

The reason this stuff didn't work before is because we couldn't run the turbine this way. Now we have viable energy storage technology and can make some of the most difficult variables into constants.

Chrysler built one in the 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Turbine_Car

afaik microturbines are less efficient, louder and hotter than piston engines.

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It was tried in the 60s and 70s, most seriously by Chrysler, and the emissions and drivability weren't great because it was in the "we need to get it working good before we go back and mop up all the other stuff" phase or R&D. The fuel crisis plus the state of automatic transmissions at the tie kept it a back burner item so development was slow and not a priority nor did other OEMs invest seriously.

Chrysler flamboyantly gave this back burner project up and promised to halt further development as part of the wrangling around the government loan they got to save them from bankruptcy in 1979.

Basically it was a song and dance to win political points among the same generation of absolute genius environmentalist who thought moving a steel mill from Ohio where you can regulated it to China where you can't is a win.

I suspect that had the project died a natural death in the 80s rather than being publicly executed as a warning we likely would see some trickle of development these days since they see like a nice natural pairing for various sorts of EVs and CVT powertrains.

It's also worth noting the degree to which facilities and talent pool overlapped between Chrysler, Chrysler Defense, how much more porous the corporate world was 50yr ago and that that Chrysler did ultimately get someone else's turbine into a running driving mass production vehicles in the form of the M1 Abrams so it's not like the technology is unsuitable on a fundamental level.

Yeah but I suppose you'd only use them if your hybrid ran out of battery power.

An every-day diesel-electric locomotive solves the gearing (torque) problem, and can let the engine run at the most-efficient speed that can produce the required power output. The required output power is dynamic, though, so in practice the diesel engine runs at a variety of speeds along a given route across the plains or over the pass or whatever.

It's hard to make an engine that runs at peak efficiency at a range of speeds and power demands. But when batteries are added, the picture can change quite a lot.

The engine can be built and sized to run efficiently at a fixed speed, and its power output never needs to exceed whatever the generator that it drives is able to accept.

So when it runs, the combined engine+generator set can be run full-assed. No half-assing required. It's a binary state. On, or off. Full-staff, or flaccid.

By reducing variables in this way, all of the fuel that is burned gets converted to electrical power as efficiently it can be for the process at-hand. (It's also easier to quiet an engine that runs at a fixed speed than one that runs at variable speeds; things get a lot simpler when there's only one set of identified frequencies to bother with.)

While the engine is on, some of that electrical power can get used for driving an electric motor for propulsion and the rest can go into a battery.

If it is on and the vehicle is stationary, then all of that electrical power can go into a battery while the engine is remains at full-chooch.

When the battery gets full-enough and/or demand is low-enough, then the engine can just turn completely off. In this mode, all of the electrical power used for propulsion then comes from the battery.

It works. There's even some boats[1] that use these concepts.

It's just an unusual arrangement for now. (It may always be an unusual arrangement if the goal is to eliminate localized combustion of fuel. But as we keep being reminded over and over on these pages, whenever a headline about vehicular electrification comes by: We aren't quite uniformly there yet.)

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

This Nissan is a serial hybrid, as in diesel electric trains.

Sounds like a pretentious way to say "the car isn't hardcore enough because it doesn't have locking diffs".

IIRC both Nissan and Toyota have a dual motor options with super weak rear motors, largely to cover "but snows" arguments. The entire car largely remains to be boring family FWD cars, not like beefy Tesla duals. Maybe GP is referring to those.

I'm guessing Nssan doesn't have it because of patents

Toyota has the best one. No clutch at all, can drive only combustion engine

I forgot which marketing name it was, but one of Honda 1-motor systems that used the motor in clutch pack had a major design oversight that it can't handle a traffic jam in an incline, which happens in (of all places)Japan; the HV battery runs out and the car needs to be towed and/or driven at higher speed to both cool down and fill back up. Generator plus traction 2-motor systems feel stupid but it's necessary to cover those situations.