Featured Toyota, a hybrid pioneer, struggles to master electric vehicles

phevs mean nothing in massachusetts anymore, and rightly so. that bridge has been crossed

 

What do you mean?
PHEV drivers do not plug them in ever?

 

no, i mean there are no tax credits or hov access. who knows how many plug in? a lot of primes were purchased because the incentives made them cheaper than a prius.

 

they sell pretty well here too, i think. but they don't need incentives anymore to sell, and the gov really wants to move people to bev's

 

Agree, these nutjobs are rampant with despicable tactics. They need to get serious jail time to discourage others from such terrorism. Having a righteous cause is NO excuse for committing such crimes. Throw the book at them!

 

There is the justifiable concern of people buying PHEVs for the incentives, but not plugging them in.

That said, I don't think the current federal tax credits actually exclude PHEVs. Battery capacity limits might.

 

Where I live the electric company has $1000 rebate on many used plug ins. Plus county and state has something too, I already used the state and county on another one. The federal gov has a used plug in or ev, under 25k price, tax credit too up to $3000, works like the $7500 one.

 

The Prime charges usably and easily on any 15 amp or higher 120 volt wall socket. I think very few owners don’t charge. Only if they have no access to a wall socket anywhere in their area. The Prime is even better than a full ev in this regard imo. I love getting a usable charge for the next day or three from a wall socket free of charge to me somewhere. Technically a full ev can pull the same electricity, but the Prime has the engine and potentially 60 mpg or more, it doesn’t have to charge. Thank you Toyota ev engineering, better than expected in the real world use, as always.

 

People were buying PiPs, Volts, and gen4 Primes with no intention of charging for the HOV stickers in California. Probably not a concern now, as I think PHEVs no longer qualify for those.

The way PHEV incentives were structured in the EU lead to businesses buying them as company cars for employees that had no way of charging them at home or the office. On top of that, they would supply the employee with a card to pay for gas, but not one to pay for charging. The popular PHEVs there weren't much better on liquid fuel than their non-plug in counter parts.

Having incentives to purchase PHEVs without a means of encouraging charging them can do no good, or even cause harm. The same thing happened when the US tried to promote E85 cars.

 

If someone has a plug-in hybrid with similar miles and size and condition to my car and doesn't plug it in, I will trade them. I will plug it in.

 

You could again get a carpool sticker on a prius prime or a bmw 330e in california this year. I am not sure when they added them back but just checked the CARB site for eligible stickers.

EU did blow it with huge incentives for businesses. Since the employees didn't pay for the cars they didn't charge. I don't think that is the case in california, but I doubt these phevs need the carpool incentives. They just have to move production to the US to get the federal incentives.

+1

I do think the flex fuel was killed more because of the hydrogen lobby than bad driver choice. The thing is when ethanol prices got higher than gasoline, then e85 didn't sell well. When California killed the experiment in favor of hydrogen, many fewer stations even offered e85.

I have unfortunately had to visit two people in the hospital a lot lately. From a year ago there are many more plug-ins, and I saw a jeep phev, and a few primes in the charging spots. Last year it was almost all teslas. Now phevs and bevs from all makes. Infrastructure is being built but slowly and faster in some places than others. New appartments here all have charging spots.

 

I brought up the EU as an example of doing incentives poorly. The flexfuel ones were like it in that they encouraged cars to be sold, but there was no accompying program to get people to use the alternate fuel. With E85, there were large areas of the country where stations could not be found, but the manufacturers still got CAFE credits for selling flexfuel vehicles in them.

 

It seemed the worst part was Flex fuels allowed manufacturers to count their fuel economy only towards the portion that was gasoline & not the grain or whatever else was used to make flex fuel. That would bump up their EPA mpg .... even though they got worse actual mileage.
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That's precisely why I compared the program to the EU's PHEV one. The companies could calculate the CAFE assuming E85 use without any evidence that it was actually happening. Once the rules changed to that they did, the number of flex-fuel models for sale dropped.