boemBattery electric vehicles lose their spark in Europe as hybrids steal the show
This is a bit surprising to me tbh, Europe seems like the perfect place for little 100 mile range EV’s to kick ass. Over here in North America I can see hybrids being the current hot ticket because people regularly drive hundreds of miles for trips and work. Seems less common there but I may be wrong
Batteries are expensive, range causes anxiety, a small battery is possible in a hybrid thus price is lower
Yeah and new plug in hybrids get like 50 miles or so of range. So most people can use that for work commutes and everyday stuff, etc, but still have the gas engine for their long road trips
Except people don’t plug in their hybrids and run them on fossil fuels. Hybrids are yet another way the FF industry keeps itself going while pretending things are being fixed
Real-world usage of plug-in hybrid vehicles in Europe: A 2022 update on fuel consumption, electric driving, and CO2 emissions - International Council on Clean Transportation
Analysis of the average real-world fuel consumption and electric driving share of PHEVs in Europe, with an emphasis on WLTP type-approved vehicle models.
BuelldozerSince the study was from Europe I’m going to assume that the primary thing holding people back from plugging in is that they can’t. Many, if not most, of them will live in multi-tenant dwellings and most of those dwellings likely don’t have the infrastructure to make it possible.
It’s the same problem that apartment dwellers here in the US have, there’s nowhere convenient to recharge.
The average real-world electric driving share is about 45%–49% for private cars and about 11%–15% for company cars.
I would argue that 45% electric driving is still significant. Company cars not being used similarly likely has a deeper issue
narc0tic_birdPeople still go on holiday once or twice a year, snd many travel by car and always prefer their own car over rental. A 100 mile range EV being good for 95% of your use cases doesn’t help you much with the other 5%.
Same reasoning people use to justify buying F350s here in the states. It’s a bullshit reason IMO.
People need to hire vehicles occasionally rather than buy more polluting vehicles against some rare edge case
FaceDeerOr we need to try to accommodate the needs that people actually have rather than telling them they should change what they need. That's somewhat more likely to actually work.
I mostly agree with your statement. If you want people to switch to alternatives, the alternative needs to be better than the status quo in some way.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t rent a car for these occasions, I’m just saying that’s probably the reason why hybrids are more popular.
Rent one for holidays or better go by train. And no i think most fly.
Going by train in some countries is a huge pain in the butt though (Germany for example).
Cagers have this argument of "but what if I want to do this cross country trip to bumfucknowhere" ... Similar to when asked why they can't give up their car "what if I want to transport a washing machine" ... As if those people load up their cars with 5 tons of bulky cargo and be driving around the world on a daily basis and there not being any other ways to handle such edge cases.
EngineerGamingTo be fair, this could be an argument. I don’t have a car now, and when I do buy it - the usecase would be long road trips to where public transport is bad or carrying cargo to my vacation house. Only half of that would be easily doable with an EV’s range. For city commutes, public transport is preferred, and trips to the vacation house without cargo could be made on electric trains faster.
What’s a cager? I can’t give up my car because I can’t bike to work, buses go way too fast on the highway which is dangerous and illegal, and I don’t earn enough to buy an EV or to relocate near my job.
You must understand that poor people can’t live in the EV utopia right now. Car makers will have to sell small and cheap EVs.
It’s an issue of charging. Europe has cities that are very old. Streets are narrower than North America. Many apartments don’t have underground parking. Cars are parked on the street. There’s nowhere to plugin the EV overnight.
Definitely this
In France if you have a parking spot, you have a legal right to get a plug there even if you’re renting.
It doesn’t fix the problem for people with no parking who do only street parking, but people who can’t afford a parking spot rarely buy a shiny new EV to start with.
kurcatoviumI was buying new (used) car half a year ago. There were two reasons why I ended with ICE again.
Price. EV, even used ones, are so damn expensive it’s just not for normal people. Everyone is saying how they lose value instantly and so on, but when I look at the market, even the cheapest ones (over 10 years old Nissan Leaf that will do less than 80 km on battery at summer) are ridiculously priced compared to ICE of the same age and similar specs. At least that’s what it is in my country.
Chargers. I live in an appartement without garage, parking on the street. No way to charge it with “cheap household electricity” over night. There are I believe 3 chargers in my ~15k town and every single one is ridiculously overpriced. 1 kWh there costs almost as half a litre of gas. Considering fuel/electricity consumption, this is making the cost per km of both options virtually identical for me.
Everyone around me is very EV-skeptical and old fashioned. I’m not and I’m cheering for EVs. So I really wanted to switch, but hell it wasn’t making any sense yet.
Another obnoxious headline
Overall, new car registrations were down by 3 percent in May 2024, according to ACEA.
The combined share of petrol and diesel cars dropped below half – falling from 52.1 percent to 48.5 percent.
According to figures from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA), BEVs accounted for 12.5 percent of the EU car market, a drop from 13.8 percent a year ago. Hybrid electrics, however, grew from 25 percent to nearly 30 percent.
New car registrations: -3% in May 2024; battery electric 12.5% market share
In May 2024, car registrations in the European Union decreased by 3%, with declines observed in three out of the region’s four major markets: Italy (-6.6%), Germany (-4.3%), and France (-2.9%). Spain, on the other hand, achieved a modest growth of 3.4% last month.
Important to know that real-world testing shows that PHEVs are rarely plugged in and just burn oil much of the time
Real-world usage of plug-in hybrid vehicles in Europe: A 2022 update on fuel consumption, electric driving, and CO2 emissions - International Council on Clean Transportation
Analysis of the average real-world fuel consumption and electric driving share of PHEVs in Europe, with an emphasis on WLTP type-approved vehicle models.
And more of it, because they carry battery and gas and 2 motors.
And burn even more than pure ICEs since they also carry the added weight from the electric stuff. At a time where we need much less cars overall, including EVs.
That’s news to me considering the EPA-rated fuel economy of vehicles with both hybrid and pure ICE drivetrains is universally higher for the hybrid versions.
An ICE vehicle needs a much larger engine than is truly necessary due to the inefficiencies and limitations of mechanical transmissions, whereas a hybrid can have a much smaller, more efficient engine.
A hybrid can potentially act like a ‘perfect’ transmission, capable of taking in power from an engine running at its single most efficient RPM and, with the aid of battery storage, produce any combination of speed and torque that has an average power less than the output of the ICE.
I think what he might be saying is running a Plug in hybrid only on gas takes more than a regular hybrid because of the extra weight. That makes sense to me but I’m not sure if that’s what he means
They said “pure ICE,” so I don’t think that’s what they’re saying. But yes, a non-plugin hybrid should do better than a plugin hybrid if the plugin is never plugged in.
But it doesn’t. PHEVs can still regenerate during braking though. ICE only vehicles can cut fuel when off throttle, but that’s not going reclaim the heat lost to braking.
PHEVs should still be more efficient overall especially in cities and stop and go traffic.
If we had ICE only vehicles with tiny engines maybe your point could work, but we don’t anymore at least not in the US.
That’s news to me considering the EPA-rated fuel economy of vehicles with both hybrid and pure ICE drivetrains is universally higher for the hybrid versions.
Because they make certain assumptions. Fortunately the EU mandated that cars measures those things since various years. That caused a review of those hybrids. They’re usually not charged.
Nothing in that comment discussed plugin hybrids though.
A non plug-in hybrid will be more efficient than a full gas vehicle because of the efficiency you can gain through minimizing the engine and tuning it for a more limited rpm range.
This ideally carries over to a plug-in hybrid in the same way even if it’s never plugged in, if all the gas engine does is charge the battery it can be more efficient than a gas only car due to reduced engine size requirements.
And electric is better for acceleration, so you get the best of both worlds.
I love how you completely ignored the context of my comment and thus completely missed the point.
That’s a shame. I love my PHEV because it’s an EV for driving around the city, but I can still use gas stations on road trips. I plug it in everywhere I can.
Same here, and I am hoping that as battery density increases I may be able to extend the range on mine when the car gets old enough for a rebuild.
Thanks for sharing this. Very interesting and a little surprising. I love my phev and keep it charged as much as possible because I notice acceleration benefits, pre-conditioning benefits, and obvious fuel savings, as well as time saving not having to gas up. I also have no fears of battery discharge like I would with full electric. I live in the states and charging stations are still pretty rare outside major metro areas and a lot of things are pretty spread out here so I still find full EV unfortunately a bit impractical. I CN imagine anyone not charging their phev whenever the opportunity presents.
The average real-world electric driving share is about 45%–49% for private (phev) cars and about 11%–15% for company cars
45-49% on privately owned cars isn’t rarely, but 10-15% on the corporate side totally is. However I can also understand employees not wanting to give their company free electricity every night, while simultaneously companies do not have plans in place for employees to charge at work.
Company purchasing managers would be better off just buying regular hybrids if they’re not going to set up a plan to keep these charged, otherwise they’ll never get the financial benefits that sold them on the phev in the first place.
This was a problem with government owned Volts, they reimbursed for gas as this was already happening for the rest of the ICE fleet but had no way to reimburse for charging. Would not be surprised if this trend is the same for many company fleets too. Fix that and you would probably see similar numbers to private ownership.
They still get way better gas mileage. They also don’t cost $15,000 when the battery goes bad. I replaced my 12 year old prius battery myself in like two hours after buying a brand new $2,900 replacement from the Toyota dealership. Could have just bought and replaced the bad cell in it, but in a 12 year old battery I’d probably have another to replace within a year and just have to keep going in and replacing one after the other, which would be a pain.
That makes no sense. The entire point of a PHEV is that you can just plug it in at your house and drive to work for virtually free, well still being able to visit people who live a decent distance away on the weekends.
It’s sad to see the oil industry’s propaganda campaign working so well.
RememberTheApollo_It’s infrastructure. Too inconvenient to find a spot to charge, the apartments where you live probably don’t have chargers, your workplace doesn’t either…
In France installing a charger in appartement building is mandatory if the resident asks for it, even if they’re renting.
Hybrids: the worst of both worlds.
If you want to keep relying on gasoline then just buy an ICE car
Where I am the charging infrastructure is terrible and electricity prices are bad. I was considering a hybrid but I guess if it’s no better I’ll just grab a regular ICE
It’s sort of a flawed opinion. If you’re never charging at home and doing a lot of driving, a hybrid won’t make much difference and might cost more. If you’re conscientious about charging when you can and mostly drive within range of your battery’s capacity, it can be almost as effective as full electric. Stats indicate most PHEV owners use the the same way you would use an ICE, car, which is more expensive and a bit of a waste.
More than the charging infrastructure it is the city infrastructure: when you have condos built without any planning 50 or more years ago, even if you pass a law that every home need to have a charging station in these condos it is physically impossible to do it. Charging infrastructure comes after you solve the problem where to put 70 or more charging station for every condo in the district.
In the US they’re the best of both worlds, especially if you get a plugin electric car. Charging infrastructure sucks for longer trips (fast charging is often broken or missing), and Americans like longer trips, so gas is preferred. But around town, it’s nice to not need to fill up.
That may not be the case in Europe, idk.
Hybrids: the worst of both worlds.
If you want to keep relying on gasoline then just buy an ICE car
Maybe I can use a hydrid: short trip (to the train station/mall/small affairs in the vicinity) go in electric, longer trip use gasoline.
Not everyone has a charging station at home and in many places you cannot install it, be because forbidden by some old laws or because there is not the physical option.
It seems to be a misleading title.
It mentions a European associations data but then they only point to the German Market, that Germans are cooling on electric.
I see no numbers for that being the case in say my Country where even people with hybrids are switching to electric due to legislation placing hybrids in the same category as CE cars.
Also isnt is because subsides on electric cars ended so either A everyone bought while you could get them cheaper so the demand has fallen of B they are more expensive so naturaly pepole are picking cheaper car. It doesnt really matter if car will save you 30000 thousands euro throught it lifetime on fuel if you dont have 30000 more to spend.
Ultimately we will see in a year whetewer electric cars just went to its natural equlibrium without subsidies and its share will continue to rise once again or its an actual trend.
Not sure what you mean :)
My point was that the article was making false assumptions about Europeans are cooling on EVs as a whole based on one dataset which cherry picked Germany.
I will make a few assumptions of my own based on what I see: 1: Germany Auto industry have been show to make good EVS, they do huge hybrids 2: Germany have a culture of huge German SUV and Sedan cars (much like macho culture of Americans with trucks). 3: Germans love buying German cars 4: Germany subsidies it’s own cars more than imported cars (whatever the fuel type)
All that I would think would have a much higher effect on German buying trends than whatever EV vs CE vs Hybrid debate they try to pin the data on.
Again they have to show me legit data across Europe if you wanna show “a trend” in Europe, not one country which have a huge vested interest in not adopting imported EVs which are better/cheaper than their German counterparts.