Posted on 04/06/2024 12:49:48 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Battery electric vehicles like Teslas are fast, sleek, jewelrylike cars that capture the imagination. Hybrid cars, at least in the U.S., often bring to mind the Toyota Prius, long seen as a dawdling, egg-shaped vehicle for shuttling back and forth to Trader Joe's.
But quietly amid all the BEV hype, automakers' hybrid fleets took broad strides forward. Car buyers flinched at the challenges of EV ownership. And sales of hybrid cars, led by Toyota Motor (TM) and Honda Motor (HMC), ramped up to outpace those of the flashier electric vehicles.
Now carmakers are in overdrive to respond as analysts take a red pen to their BEV forecasts.
The revision in consumer preferences, and the expense of making and selling battery electric vehicles, has forced General Motors (GM) and Ford Motor (F) into an abrupt shift. Both legacy automakers are interrupting their highly publicized and expensive transitions to battery EVs to reemphasize hybrid cars.
Tesla (TSLA), struggling against rising strength of EV competitors in China led by BYD (BYDDF), risks losing market share as hybrids surge. More precarious startups including Rivian (RIVN) and Lucid (LCID), which sell electric vehicles in low volumes and have no hybrid models to ride out the storm, face a darker outlook. And the change could signal the death knell for the weakest of the EV players, most notably Fisker (FSR).
The most recent models of hybrid cars strengthen the technology's image. They offer eye-popping performance and mileage claims. In other words, they bust the old hybrid image of being underpowered and overpriced.
“ You have vehicles with great fuel economy, as hybrids have always had, but the latest hybrids are also just better vehicles," said Keith Barry, an editor at Consumer Reports' Auto Test Center in Colchester, Conn.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
I agree with you there. It should not be forced. Objective good ideas don’t need forcing. Good ideas sell themselves.
Some people don’t have the money to maintain their vehicles, even if the costs are higher over the long-term because of that.
I include wise driving habits in maintenance.
You can get a lot more out of your brakes, tires, etc...
But maintenance costs are another reason I won’t own a hybrid or an EV.
We have friends and family who own them, and they all pay more for maintenance than we do.
Hybrids are mostly mechanical, hardly different than EV’s. So the costs should be about the same for the mechanical parts and the battery should pay for itself over the driving life of the car.
I don’t lump hybrids in same class as EV’s, as far as problems go. It’s a mechanical car with the addition of a battery that pays for itself in how much driving you do, unless you are a long-hauler traveler.
Everyone we know who has a hybrid is in the shop far more than we are, not always mechanical issues.
Some of it was under warranty, so no out of pocket, but due to the time involved to get anything done, all the issues have been an almighty pain in the tuchus.
Getting auto techs around here is a nightmare.
Getting high tech auto techs even worse.
Parts are also an issue. ICE parts can take a while. Hybrid and EV even longer.
We don’t live in a major metro.
Maybe the situation is better in those, but in our Upstate NY neck of the woods hybrids and EVs are just deeper holes in the road you throw money in.
Also, a lot of the existing homes around here still have 60A services.
Not gonna see too many hybrids parked in front of those.
Can’t really understand the hype for plug in hybrids. At best, you can drive 30 minutes on the battery. If your car gets 30 mpg average your saving about 1/2 gallon of gas. In California, that amounts to about $2.50. Offset that with the higher cost of charging your plug in, 11 hours on a 110v connection, about 4 hours on a 240v connection. And if you don’t have a 240 line in your garage you have to pay an electrician to install one. So where’s the savings?
“Hybrids are typically the worst of both worlds. Double the weight and slower than both ICE and EVs”
Ummm ok.
They aren't all that popular compared to BEVs and regular hybrids. California recorded ~380K BEV sales and ~64K PHEV sales last year.
Our 1,600 sq ft 1952 ranch house had 40 amp service. What it was built, it was TWICE the size of the average house being built in 1952.
As you might imagine, we were blowing breakers all the time. We finally remodeled the kitchen ten years ago and upgraded the electrical panel and drop from the pole to 300 amps.
That’s the exact model I almost got killed in due to no power. Never AGAIN!
The Toyota Sequoia I wanted came with a Hybrid. The engine is a 3.4l V-6, Twin Turbo Hybrid. 440HP, 800’s torque. I’m liking it very well. Took some getting used to driving around with the engine not running and not reacting to the engine starting. In a matter of days, I no longer noticed if the engine was running or not. The hybrid in this configuration is more about low end performance to move the vehicle until the boost comes up on the small displacement motor.
I can see this engine not being for everyone. It is a high performance, small displacement motor. It is throaty, you can hear the turbos and it is very “sit you back in the seat” quick. It starts like an INDYCAR in that the hybrid motor turns the crank and it fires when fuel is turned on. You don’t hear a starter motor whirring. While I enjoy those traits, some might not. I can haul 8 and get 22mpg.
We had a 60A service and a fuse box for decades.
I got very good at knowing what to plug in where and when.
When we upgraded we went straight to a 200A service.
What a difference.
For the past two years the wife and I have lived in Japan. Don't own a car anymore: the trains are good enough for us now as retirees. But we have a pickleball friend here who is a test driver for Honda which has a big R&D facility and NASCAR-style test track on the outskirts of our north-of-Tokyo city.
We traveled with this friend and his wife on a weekend with his Honda CRV Hybrid and the performance of that car was really great as we rode a winding path through the mountains.
Half the cars on the road here are small, under-powered EVs with small tires, but they are perfect for everyday life in the city and for passing through often very narrow residential streets. Yearly car inspections are expensive in Japan, but the government gives a break to EV owners.
Invariably a family here will have an EV for taking the kids to school, grocery shopping etc., and then a stylish hybrid for intercity or highway driving.
The decline in U.S. passenger rail ridership didn't happen overnight. It's been a long term trend that follows the success of automobiles across a wide continent with plenty of open space.
Another factor is the tendency of larger businesses to locate outside the city -- producing the "Suburban Sprawl" you see in cities like Atlanta and Los Angeles.
Not only does this gut the inner city of jobs, but State and local governments are notorious for striking business development deals and tax breaks to bring corporations into a small cities promising "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" which almost never materialize. This basically fleeces the local city taxpayer. But I digress.
A high interesting contrast between the U.S. and Japan is that the Shinkansen bullet trains compete very effectively with airlines for short- to mid-range business and tourist travel.
In America, by the time you drive your car to the airport, park it, pass through security, and wait 30 minutes to an hour to board your flight, taxi to the runway, and fly to your destination, a huge block of time elapses.
But to travel by Shinkansen from my Utsunomiya city (eastern Japan) to Kyoto (central Japan) takes only 4 hours with no security screening, boarding/deboarding times, or delays because the train arrives and leaves within 5 minutes on a very punctual schedule... and you jump aboard into a kind of business class seat. The fare is about $100 U.S. dollars (at current rate of 150 yen to the dollar).
And yet, the domestic airline business in Japan is also big -- the 4th largest in ridership of all nations. And so the longer range travel from the Tokyo area to western cities like Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Kumamoto, Kagoshima is where flying an airline is more time- and cost-effective.
Of course, America's airline passenger traffic dwarfs every other country in the world by a long shot.
So I've scratched the surface of comparing public passenger transportation in U.S. vs. Japan. When I get more facts, I plan to post a vanity.
Train companies never understood they were 'people mover' companies and needed to connect up to other 'people mover' companies not just to inner city stations deadens built a hundred years ago.
Train stations should be next to car rental places at Airports - between the Ubers and the shuttle to the main buildings and parking garage. Also in the states - especially places like Florida - trains should be geared toward an enjoyable experience - not just 'getting to work fast'. '
It really does amaze me who make up the “leadership” of the big automakers, around the world. I think it lends a ton of credence as to a select geoup of people making tons of all the EV scams.
Interestingly, Rivian has stopped construction on there fantasy land in Georgia. And they have done a third round of layoffs.
Car companies are being forced to sell EV's onto a public that for the most part doesn't want them. All while the Dims are destroying the grid that would charge the EV's.
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