“If there is one consistent fact about electric vehicles, it’s that they are unreliable.”
The writer has just said in print what so many of us were thinking. Oh, they are a dandy little hi-tech plaything when they are new, but for good solid reliability, the internal combustion engine has been engineered and tinkered to a very high standard. EVs have always been a niche vehicle, and for as long as they rely on batteries for energy storage, their application will be limited.
Now, if only an on-board electrical generation system can be made to fit on the same space as now taken up by the battery array, then applying electric propulsion to the wheels would make a great deal of sense as an engineering achievement. Electric applications that can get the power generated as needed, and not have to go through a stopgap storage system that is rapidly becoming expensive to build and replace when it fails, and is largely not amenable to recycling, should be the direction of research and engineering design.
Perhaps some kind of supercapacitor, on which the release of energy could be modulated and controlled, or an auxiliary flywheel device to store the energy as a kinetic spinning inertia, say 30,000 rpm or so at max.
Or maybe we could go straight to hydrogen fuel cells. All we would have to do is open up the hydrogen mines.
Diesel engines driving generators, driving electric motors at the wheels.
For many applications for many people in many cities and jobs, a hybrid DOES make sense . A hybrid IS economical and DOES allow emergency and all-weather service.
But this administration HATES ALL ENERGY options that make sense and are economical.
So you hear nothing about hybrids.