Featured Autoline reports on SAE PHEV conference

Averages are swayed heavily by outliers. PHEVs are not ideal vehicles for people with the longest commutes. They may be better served with long-range EVs instead. The median one-way commute in the US appears to be about 8 miles. (https://www.streetlightdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Commutes-Across-America_180201.pdf) In most other countries, it's even less than that. A PHEV with a 25-mile EV range could easily provide gasoline-free commute to majority of American of drivers. That's why I oppose the idea that a PHEV should have 50-mile EV range for a subsidy. The batteries used in two 50-mile PHEVs, could be used to produce three 30-mile PHEVs instead. That's better for the environment.

People also seem to confuse a problem of incentives with a problem of powertrain. Corporate PHEVs not getting plugged in is a failure in the design of the incentives. We should push for carbon tax to account for the negative externalities of gasoline usage. That would also clean up the grid. Then nobody in the right mind would add range to their PHEV with gasoline when they can do the same with electricity for much less money. Many PHEVs also offer better performance when they're fully charged. You'd be silly not to charge.

 

No need to even go to those lengths. All you have to do is make sure electricity is significantly cheaper than gas. People go to extraordinary lengths to save money. Unfortunately, states and localities are implementing policies that are creating incentives to prefer gas over electricity. My own electric rates at home make charging more expensive than gas during part of the day. Public chargers already cost more than gas almost 100% of the time, which is why I do not use them. If the trend continues as it has for the last couple of years it will always be more expensive to charge at home than to burn gas and I will stop charging at home, too.

The knee jerk reflex of mini-dictators is to of course just use the state's police powers to FORCE people to charge. It's not motivated by any benevolent intent with regard to the environment, but by a dedication to co-opting the levers of government to benefit corporate interests. If the interest was the environment they would be working to make clean electricity cheaper instead of making it more profitable for utility executives and shareholders. Instead, states like California are doing things like proposing massive taxes on home solar. Their actions betray their intentions.

 

Demand is also peaking at those times, and those solar and wind installations weren't free. The price competitiveness of wind with traditional power plants is still a recent event.

 

It depends

PHEVs should have efficiency floors for credits, auto makers could make more efficient car designs and by requiring the gas only efficiency especially in the winter to be above that of a simple gas powered vehicle you could ensure power hybrids and other turd sandwiches are much less likely to get built and sold.

As for why corporate entities aren’t charging its a simple case of
1. Cost
2. Availability

If your company won’t reimburse for EV charging, you don’t have places to freely charge and the charging on a trip takes much longer to execute you get a foregone conclusion

 

Not in California. The utilities shifted peak rates to the evening so that they wouldn't have to apply those high prices to customers with solar as net metering credits. Simple solution was to move peak to evening so they could minimize the net metering credits.

An easy fix for California's Public Utilities Commission (if they were really intent on encouraging widespread solar adoption) would be to require utilities to credit customers for excess power at the same rates the utility is paying for wholesale power at the same date and time the excess is generated. They will never do that in a hundred years because they are bought and paid for by the electrical utilities. Instead they're proposing a massive tax on residential solar arrays, to be credited to the utilities of course.

 

I’m invested in some power companies, and the dividends have been incredible.
They’re making money hand over fist, and keeping pols well buttered