Redistribute the batteries
Modern hybrids have gotten crazy, a few plug-in hybrids can go months without using any gas if your commute is shortish, but then do a 500 mile road trip without stopping easily.
I want a plug-in hybrid but my small town has no plug in spots and it costs so much money to get your garage or house up to code for a plug in :( no evs here either for the same reason, no transit, and it's a classic sprawled out to shit small town so biking and walking is rough and can be dangerous (especially with the morons dirivng their lifted pick ups practicing for drunk driving on Fridat and Saturday night)
For a usecase like charging over-night, is a 110v charger not good enough? I wouldn't think you'd need anything changed.
I've only been around a standard prius, not a plugin so I'm not super familiar with the day-to-day.
There's a couple teslas in my complex with zero infrastructure for charging, I cant imagine having to sit at a wawa for an hour once a week.
No idea, I was told by my electrician friends it's north of $2k-$5k but maybe she was talking about upgrading it to level 2...
I was looking at getting a Chevy Volt and they can charge on a regular outlet, but an electrician told me that my wiring is old enough that it might trip the breaker, and it would cost a few thousand to upgrade the wiring and breaker box. I decided to keep my old car until it's not worth fixing, then I'll get some kind of plugin hybrid.
That's a shame!! Otherwise I've heard the volt is quite good.
Check out if others have had thins problem, there may be a way to intentionally charge it at low speeds. Since it's a hybrid the battery is small
I did actually go and test-drive a Volt at a used car dealership. It's pretty nice, although my Subaru has more power, a nicer and roomier interior, and all-wheel drive. I'll probably go with a Volt if I need to replace my Subaru in the future.
The problem is mostly due to the old aluminum wiring in my house and not the Volt itself. My understanding is that the Volt can be fully charged overnight from a regular 110V outlet.
PS: it might've been a few hundred to upgrade the wiring, I forget the quote.
Toyota is right but they should've made cars like the Corolla a hybrid by standard way earlier. Like 2015 or whatever, the tech was pretty mature then. For 2023 it became a hybrid as standard
You know what drives me fucking crazy is that the fossil fuel industry still couldve had us hooked on burning oil and shit but still have EVs in the like 1930s. It would've been way more efficient to just plug your car in and drive around but still burn oil for electricity.
But noooo, it's not about efficiency, it's about profit and about selling more oil in inefficient ICEs and dumping the cost somewhere profit doesn't notice like our shared atmosphere.
To be fair, electric cars were janky shitboxes until modern lithium batteries and solid-state controllers came along
I feel like this is obvious and better, as batteries are fucking expensive and extremely heavy.
If you make the hybrid battery replaceable, we could have 20 year cars, easily.
Also hybrid buses rock.
e-bikes are the real sweet spot, but USA is hell on wheels
just for comparison sake
fancy e-cargo bike battery: 545 WattHours
rav4 plugin hybrid battery: 18.1 KiloWattHours
Chinese (BYD) mini EV battery: 32.2 KiloWattHours
tesla model 3 lower range battery: ~65 KiloWattHours
electric hummer battery: 200+ KiloWattHours
so one plugin hybrid is equivalent to ~33 fancy e-cargo bikes worth of battery
and one electric hummer is equivalent to 11 plugin hybrids or 364 e-cargo bikes
The battery pack in a Hummer EV weighs as much as an entire Mazda Miata
I'm seriously looking at an ebike for commuting, at least for part of the year.
The next problem to solve is access. I have financial access to a new hybrid or full electric car, but when I had to buy a new car last year, I had to buy a full gas car. I simply don't have a place to charge it; I rent, my landlord won't put in a plug, I don't live anywhere near a place I could reliably charge it, and there just aren't really other feasible options for me.
Some cities are starting to force new construction to have plugs for this stuff but there are always all sorts of exemptions, and that only really helps if you have a parking spot and/or garage. What do we do about street parking?
My dream is a car-free world, but my second dream is that street level charging becomes commonplace. Run lines down along the edge of the road in cities so people can park anywhere and just...plug in. Run it near the existing drainage infrastructure. Expensive? Yes, absolutely. Would it go a long way towards improving the quality of life of literally everyone, everywhere? Also yes. And in a country where people turn their noses up at literally any public works project that isn't car centric, it's an option that shouldn't be too politically difficult to implement.
