Featured Toyota Reveals EV Prototypes Ahead of 2020 Launch

Have hybrids been successful in your mind?
If "hybrids work" it would seem EVs work as EVs are selling at rates greater than hybrids.
True, there are more hybrids on the market, but they started selling in numbers 13 years before EVs. In another 13 years I expect there to be a lot more EVs on the roads than hybrids.

 

EVs have been brought by a lot of manufacturers, HVs only by few.

Europe-wise 2017-2018:
HEV+PHEV went up 33% to 3.9% share (606 thousand units)
BEV went up 48.2% to 1.3% share (201 thousand units)

2018 (Full Year) Europe: Electric and Plug-In Hybrid Car Sales per EU and EFTA Country - Car Sales Statistics

In 13 years, looking at the immense 56% Petrol ICEs still sold in 2018...I foresee hybrids may still be more present for some time more.

 

Not really - same as EVs. Really low market share.

No, hybrids can cover all use cases, from small cars to off-road mining trucks.

When I said they "work", I was talking about use cases, not market share. Consumers are dumb and uninformed so use-case and purchase decisions are barely connected. By now, every vehicle could have easily been a hybrid and still done the exact same job, but better. Not so for EVs.

 

This is the crux of the matter. Hybrids do no good if people don't buy them.
Most people simply don't buy a product if the only advantage it has is fuel efficiency.
Most people, for whom they work, will buy EVs because they offer so much more than fuel efficiency.
And this is why PHEV + BEV will continue to take more and more market share. They may top out about 40%-60%, but I don't see HEVs ever getting past 5%.

 

Like you said, overall, consumers aren't the brightest bunch. But they do vote with their dollars which makes their decisions very powerful. EV's will get another segment of the average car buying public that hybrids never did, the one who cares about how the vehicles drives and how powerful it is. I won over tons of family members with rides/drives in my Tesla on Easter. These are people who would never even consider a hybrid. Many of them are thinking about a short range one for shorter trips and around town, and keep a gasser for long road trips. But my guess is that once they drive the Tesla a while they won't want to drive anything else.

 

Like what? Quiet, smooth and responsive is about it, but pure EVs also offer less range and slow refueling at limited locations.

 

Which doesn't matter when over 90% of the cars use is covered by home or work charging, and the majority of households have two or more cars to cover the times the BEV isn't the best option.

 

People keep saying this, and it's a total cop-out.

Yeah, a bike is a suitable car for the same reason - it covers 90% of my trips. In fact, my sneakers are similarly useful as a car, because they cover well over 90% of my trips. Heck, I just came back from the bathroom using my sneakers.

If you need to have another car to cover the shortcomings of your main car, then your main car is not doing the job and the main car has far, far less value. Think about it. Which would you rather have, one $30k car that does everything or one $40k car that does 90% and another, say, $20k car that does the other 10% and which you have to house, maintain and insure?

I just drove my car to work, 11 miles. I also drove it on an 18 day 3,000 mile trip across the south-west. I also took it to the mountains when it was -5F and where I parked in a dirt parking lot with no street lights, much less chargers.

Having to own a second car to cover the shortcomings of your main car is strong indication that the main car isn't cutting it. All but one person I know who owns an EV has a second car to cover the things the EV won't do.

 

Do you think a household with two working adults and children could function with just one car in most of the US?

 

Yes, but that's changing the topic.

Do you think two working adults and children could do everything with two EVs?

 

Well, the majority of those households disagree with you, and getting them to switch one car to a plug in is easier than getting them to go down to one car, which would require more changes in behavior than driving a BEV.

Depends on the EVs and what constitutes their everything.

 

Yeah...if they never take their cars out-of-town or off the beaten path and fly to all their vacations it will work.

And, yes, the very fact that the best EV approach is to have a spouse with a conventional car you use when you want to go out of town shows the current technology limitations of today's EVs. And, like I said, everyone I know with an EV but one does exactly this. That one is a retiree with a 100D Model S, and he took it to Detroit from Denver, once, staying on the interstates the whole time. This is also why the Leaf is so popular - it's perfect for in-town use when your spouse has the Subaru you take to the mountains or out of state, and it's relatively cheap.

 

Which is perfectly fine. Not every car in the country needs to be a BEV in order for them to have a big impact.

 

We are a two BEV family that takes vacations with our Tesla. Going on a long road trip to Yellowstone and Glacier this summer in fact.

 

Or put another way, not every car needs to burn higher maintenance, carcinogenic, explosive, non-renewable, fresh-air-destroying liquid fuel. Sure, everyone realizes that - but it doesn't matter if it gets repeated ad nauseam, right?

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Or don't let the perfect be the enemy of good enough.
Which the BEVs available now are for many.

 

It's the economy, stupid.

the public will fall over themselves re-defining what is normal if and when electric cars become cheaper to buy and cheaper to operate than gas cars.

Hybrid cars are a bit uphill- they seem to need traction battery replacements after 10-15 years, and while that may seem very reasonable for one buyer it's also enough to earn this type of car a "complicated, expensive and unreliable" reputation from plenty of other car shoppers who are spoiled for choice in depreciated ICE cars.

 

EV's will be and already are awesome used vehicles. I had ridiculously cheap total cost of ownership when I owned a used Leaf. It was 22 cents/mile all said and done (all costs, from registration to energy to insurance). Would have been a lot cheaper yet if I wouldn't have traded it it for a different vehicle. Could have used it for another 5 years yet.

 

It's not fine. It's desperately in need of improvement.

Would you be okay with pay phones all over the place - everywhere cell signals have holes? Or, do you want the cell phone carriers to fill in the holes?

When we started getting wind energy technologically viable, I decided to figure out if a 100% renewables scenario was economically possible. Took 18 months to figure it out, but it is. Why did I do that? Because a 50% solution isn't good enough.

An a 50% EV solution isn't good enough either, and we're only up to maybe a tenth of that.

 

I don't doubt it. The point of my post wasn't to suggest that EVs wouldn't make good secondhand cars, but simply to lament that affordable EVs aren't broadly available yet.