Not everyone wants an EV, especially in America. Unless EV’s can jump to 500 mile range and ubiquitous five minute charging, a lot of people are just gonna want a hybrid.
Just yesterday in the coffee shop the person next to me was having a conversation about his buyer's remorse over recently purchasing a full EV instead of a hybrid or plug-in hybrid. It sounded like he hadn't anticipated how much of a hassle it is to charge on road trips. Something about having to carefully plan around the locations of fast charge stations, and it really being a drag when you're just trying to get out of the city for a weekend.
My sense is that plug-in hybrids really are the sweet spot for a lot of people in North America. The shorter full EV range is still well within most people's needs for a typical day's worth of driving, but you can still travel to and through rural areas without so much stress about whether you'll get stuck killing time for an hour or two at a slow charge station.
Superchargers aren’t available everywhere, and even in your scenario that’s still twice as long as it takes me to fill a gas tank, and you have to do it twice as often (at least).
>It sounded like he hadn't anticipated how much of a hassle it is to charge on road trips.
A few years ago this was true, but now that Tesla has opened up their network of chargers, your destination probably has to be >100 miles away from most interstate highways before road trip charging becomes much of an issue.
Even if there are charging stations every ten miles along the exact route you were already planning to take, it’s just straightforwardly true that it’s more annoying to charge vs. get gas.
I can fill my tank and be back on the road in <5 minutes in most cases, and I only have to do that once every 350 miles.
With an EV, I would be stopping anywhere from 10-30minutes (depending on the kinds of chargers available) (assuming I don’t have to wait for one to open up), and I’d be doing it twice as often.
It adds a very meaningful amount of time to long car trips.
Yes it's straightforwardly true that road trip charging is less convenient than with gas cars.
But charging for regular use is dramatically better. Anytime you're not on a road trip, you spend essentially no time fueling. Just plug in at night like you do with other electronics.
So I'll take saving 15 mins every week avoiding the gas station, in exchange for the couple times a year I have to wait an extra 15 mins charging.
Note that if your hybrid is a plug-in hybrid then you might get the best of both worlds.
On long road trips you get the fast re-energizing of a gas car.
For regular use if your plug in every night there is a good chance you can do most of your driving in EV mode. Current plug-in hybrids often have EV mode ranges of 40+ miles.
This is what someone I know with a RAV4 Prime reports. They plug in at night and it seems to mostly use the battery. It does sometime use the ICE but it is infrequently enough that they have only had to put more gas in every few months.
But you don’t really. You get a weak drive train as many moving parts as an ICE plus a non-trivial size battery that is expensive to replace. Your maintenance costs potential are as a bad as an ICE plus an EV. EVs are way more elegant solutions, simpler, better performance. Also, EVs are improving rapidly, charging speed and range keep getting better.
Hybrids done well actually have fewer moving parts than ICEs. They eliminate some systems (alternator and starter motor for example) and greatly simplify others (transmission).
I have a RAV4 Prime (decided to get that instead of a Tesla) and I absolutely love it. It's the best of all worlds for my use case (mostly <40mi daily commute entirely on battery, occasional longer drives that use gas). I often go months+ without refilling the gas tank, and it charges overnight from empty. And, it's clearly Toyota quality in terms of implementation.
He was having buyer's remorse for choosing a BEV over a PHEV. The PHEV is better on road trips and just as good at commuting. It loses on maintenance but probably still comes out ahead on TCO.
I think this is overstated. My Ford EV gets ~300 miles. If I leave my home with a full charge, I can get ~500 miles with ~30 minutes of charging. If a ~30 minute break in the middle of an ~8 hour drive is a problem for you, you probably aren't a safe driver. There is a reason that truckers have mandatory breaks. A person shouldn't be driving all day nonstop.
Really? Maybe my knowledge of EV ranges is way out of wack. I was assuming avg ranges look much more like ~200mi on a full battery in real-world conditions, and that a 30-min charge usually only gets you 80%. Sounds like I’m at least somewhat misinformed.
I tend to get better range than that, I'd like to claim it is my driving style, but more realistically it is because I live in Southern California so the battery is generally at ideal temperature, I often don't need heat/AC, and probably most importantly I'm not sure if I have ever driven 70+ mph for 300 consecutive miles without hitting traffic.
Also when I do road trips, I'll tend to do multiple shorter stops which according to that link means I'm closer to the "optimum charging area" than going 10%-80% in one sitting, so that might have caused me to overshoot that estimate a little.
So beyond that slight amendment of switching that one ~30 minute charging stop to two ~15 minute stops, the answer to ketzo's question is "yes, really", but as the saying goes, your mileage may vary.
The problem with EVs and roadtrips is simply charging infrastructure. If there were L3 chargers wherever there were gas stations, it really wouldn’t be a problem even in eastern Oregon (really want to take my i4 to John Day, but alas…not quite yet, even if you drive a Tesla).
I want a range extended EV with a easily removable power pack. Unfortunately the EPA doesn't consider it an EV so no one will make one because there's no tax credit.
In the US the BMW i3 range extender gas tank is software limited so the gas range is shorter than the ev range. That's the only way they could get it to qualify as an ev.
In the US a plug-in hybrid seems like the best of both worlds. Once the charging infrastructure gets fully flushed out pure EVs will look a lot better.
PHEVs (hybrids with large battery packs) are the worst of both worlds -- weight penalty of a big EV pack, but the complexity/maintenance of an ICE engine. Additionally, rarely used gas can go bad sitting in the tank. Just get a regular hybrid if you're concerned about EV range or don't like the current limited offerings.
It's not as easy as more components = more expensive.
The battery pack is much smaller. A Prius PHEV is almost 500 lbs lighter than a Model 3 and only 100 lbs heavier than a normal hybrid Prius, which also has a battery pack. The MSRP is lower by almost $10k, which can cover a lot of maintenance before you resell it with less depreciation.
America is massive. And has a huge portion of “wild” country. As much as I want to go EV. All my free time is in the mountains on logging roads and in sub zero temps in winter. The charging networks are not yet embedded in the small mountain towns I frequent and I can’t take that chance.
You are just describing the chicken-and-egg problem. Without enough EVs there aren't incentives to build more chargers; without enough chargers EVs aren't sold in enough numbers. That's why the EV adoption curve in the United States is still in the early adopter phase. And clearly you aren't enthusiastic about being an early adopter.
Google Search is distinct from Google's expansive ad network. Google search is now garbage, but their ads are everywhere are more profitable than ever.
On Google's earnings call - within the last couple of weeks - they explicitly stated that their stronger-than-expected growth in the quarter was due to a large unexpected increase in search revenues[0]. That's a distinct line-item from their ads business.
>Google’s core search and advertising business grew almost 10 per cent to $50.7bn in the quarter, surpassing estimates for between 8 per cent and 9 per cent.[0]
The "Google's search is garbage" paradigm is starting to get outdated, and users are returning to their search product. Their results, particularly the Gemini overview box, are (usually) useful at the moment. Their key differentiator over generative chatbots is that they have reliable & sourced results instantly in their overview. Just concise information about the thing you searched for, instantly, with links to sources.
> The "Google's search is garbage" paradigm is starting to get outdated
Quite the opposite. It's never been more true. I'm not saying using LLMs for search is better, but as it stands right now, SEO spammers have beat Google, since whatever you search for, the majority of results are AI slop.
Their increased revenue probably comes down to the fact that they no longer show any search results in the first screenful at all for mobile and they've worked hard to make ads indistinguishable from real results at a quick glance for the average user. And it's not like there exists a better alternative. Search in general sucks due to SEO.
Can you give an example of an everyday person search that generates a majority of AI slop?
If anything my frustration with google search comes from it being much harder to find niche technical information, because it seems google has turned the knobs hard towards "Treat search queries like they are coming from the average user, so show them what they are probably looking for over what they are actually looking for."
Let's try "samsung fridge review". The top results are a reddit thread, consumer reports article, Best Buy listing, Quora thread and some YouTube videos by actual humans.
> Quite the opposite. It's never been more true. I'm not saying using LLMs for search is better, but as it stands right now, SEO spammers have beat Google, since whatever you search for, the majority of results is AI slop.
It's actually sadder than that. Google appear to have realised that they make more money if they serve up ad infested scrapes of Stack Overflow rather than the original site. (And they're right, at least in the short term).
Most Google ads comes from Google search, its a misconception Google derives most of their profits from third party ads that is just a minor part of Googles revenue.
You are talking past each other. They say "Google search sucks now" and you retort with "But people still use it." Both things can be true at the same time.
You misunderstand. Making organic search results shittier will drive up ad revenue as people click on sponsored links in the search results page instead.
Not a sustainable strategy in the long term though.
We're in the phase of yanking hard on the enshittification handle. Of course that increases profits whilst sufficient users can't or won't move, but it devalues the product for users. It's in decline insomuch as it's got notably worse.
Exactly. A huge part of these projects is proving to the public the value. So even a short, direct line is useful - as some will start to use it and then extending it becomes a simple "this thing we have is good, it should be good more."
But the short direct line might also not get built, if the projections show passenger volume will not be high enough to justify the costs.
Passenger rail has high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Even with high-speed rail, you generally want to maximize the number of passengers rather than speed. Making detours to nearby major cities often makes sense, while stopping at smaller cities the route already passes through might not.
A direct connection between Toronto and Montreal would serve one pair of major cities, while a Toronto – Ottawa – Montreal – Quebec City route would serve six. The longer route could be economically more viable, even if the costs are twice as high, as the number of potential passengers is much higher.
At the high level, it made huge sense to create a Toronto - Ottawa - Montreal -QC route.
Up until a few months ago, the plan was to create a new link between Toronto/Detroit/Chicago and upgrade the links between Toronto/New York City and Montreal/New York City. In this previous world view in which we were all friends, getting as many larger Canadian cities as possible connected to this rail network was worth the cost.
Well, this could dramatically increase the demand for tantalum, which (econ 101) could dramatically increase the supply over time? Is tantalum in much demand today?
Huge demand for copper hasn’t brought its price down to the price of stainless steel, has it? Most definitely not, so it seems like Econ 101 was incomplete. Not all goods are perfectly elastic. Inelastic goods do not get cheaper with more demand.
Tantalum is in demand today, yes. Tantalum capacitors are a well known application, but it is used in all sorts of things.
My point was that even if tantalum were free, a material that is 96.5% copper is still not going to be significantly cheaper than copper, which I think is a pretty self-evident outcome.
Copper has been in high demand for centuries. Lithium might be a more similar situation to tantalum, huge spikes in demand in the last decade have absolutely floored prices
I mean, a modern computer is operating the gigahertz range. Adding a few extra bitwise instructions might be something like a nanosecond. Which is absolutely fleeting compared to memory operations.
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