Title: Electric Cars or Hybrids – Which is the Future? I’m curious, what do you think the future holds for the automotive market? Will electric cars dominate in the coming years, or do hybrids still have a long-term chance? What are your experiences with these types of vehicles?
I recently jumped to electric. I'll be going back to petrol very soon. As I don't own my house, the landlord won't allow me to have a charge point fitted, stating he doesn't want to be liable for the electric system upgrade etc. So I'd have to use a 3 pin (240v household socket) charger to charge my car, which is the slowest charge option (25 hrs to charge from 5-100% and my car only has a tiny 44kw battery) or I've got to use the one charger in my town and pay the equivalent of £1.50 a litre in fuel (currently £1.31 for petrol just up the road). And contend with the other people who charge there, or the point not working for various reasons. Hybrid is probably going to be better for people like me, others would be fine with electric. But I'm going back to petrol ICE.
I'm lucky to live in a city with great public transportation, so I don't own a car, and probably never will again. If I need one, there are always rental cars available. For the future in the automotive market, I'm quite certain that in ten years there will be almost zero newly manufactured gasoline powered cars - manufacturers will go all electric by then, and trucks as well as other heavy duty machinery might go the hydrogen fuel cell way, in case electric powered isn't sufficient for these cars.
Maybe in cities and large towns it's feasible, but us in the countryside won't be able to deal with the charge times or mileage deficit, until they can design some way of getting a battery charged much, much quicker than currently possible. When you can go from empty to full in less than one minute with ICEs there's no way EVs can compete. This is why I think hybrids could be the way forward, using the ice as a generator to drive the electric motor. That way you drastically increase the mileage per gallon, drop emissions and have refuelling times at a minimum.
That's where lots of engineers working on. There are promising experiments in the lab already - let's hope they'll come soon on the market. What's really worst in my opinion is: Batteries are not standardized. If that were the case, then one could just go to some "gas station", rip out the old battery and insert a full battery that had been prepared in the "gas" station where they would charge lots of standardized batteries all the time. Of course there's also quality control for batteries that would be worn out, but that's just a detail. Sadly regulations like standard battery size, standard openings for changing them etc. would only be good for us consumers, and not for the car makers and lobbyists
Was it Nissan who were toying with the idea of battery cells? That would make sense but, as the current size of a battery worth using is huge, swapping them would be uneconomical. Until we have either very high energy batteries at small sizes, super super fast charging, or both it is my opinion that evs will fall short for a huge number of applications and people. They're brilliant to drive, sporty EVs are amazing but are very hungry on power. I love driving mine (its the Abarth 500e, I previously had a 595 Abarth) but the battery size and charging problems has beat me.
The chinese company Nio already has a swapping system. And another chinese car company called Chery seems to work with this system too.As far as I remember, Nio wants to get into the norwegian market with these power stations as well. And it's called "Battery As A Service". No idea how far these plans are a reality now, but last I read about it (about a year ago) it sounded very interesting.
As I understand it then some of the larger auto companies are evaluating if the battery technology is ready for full E-cars in a reasonable future. Even VW are reevaluating their plans. Eventhough they are having a reasonably uptoday E-platform. So maybe Toyota was pretty smart when they refined their hybrid portofoil of cars instead of hopping on the full E-car wagon. EDIT: Conserning the pic above then its a shame old Mr. Panoz did die before Panos was ready to launch the shown E-prototype in LeMans. If they had been allowed to change the whole battery pack at pitstops and then recharge to be ready to the next pitstop then the petrol car teams could be up for some nasty surprises
Yeah hybrid is, imo, the best way forward at the current technological level. Full ev is still in its infancy and while they are amazing to drive, and have their pros, the cons far outweigh them for a huge number of people so far. And yes agreed, the panoz could have been great but I fear tyres will be the next barrier as even at a road level, evs are very rubber hungry.