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Transportation Power Technology

GM, Volkswagen Say Goodbye To Hybrid Vehicles (jalopnik.com) 336

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Auto makers for two decades have leaned on hybrid vehicles to help them comply with regulations on fuel consumption and give customers greener options in the showroom. Now, two of the world's largest car manufacturers say they see no future for them in their U.S. lineups. General Motors and Volkswagen are shifting the bulk of their future investment into fully electric cars (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), seeing hybrids, which save fuel by combining a gasoline engine with an electric motor, as only a stopgap to ultimately meeting tougher tailpipe-emissions requirements, particularly in China and Europe.

GM plans to launch 20 fully electric vehicles world-wide in the next four years, including plug-in models in the U.S. for the Chevy and Cadillac brands. Volkswagen also has committed billions to producing more battery-powered models, including introducing a small plug-in SUV in the U.S. next year and an electric version of its minibus around 2022. VW and GM are focused on all-electric cars largely because of China, where new regulations require car companies to sell a minimum number of zero-emissions vehicles to avoid financial penalties. VW plans to use its electric-car expansion in China to build scale and drive down prices faster in the U.S., said Scott Keogh, VW's U.S. chief.
"If I had a dollar more to invest, would I spend it on a hybrid? Or would I spend it on the answer that we all know is going to happen, and get there faster and better than anybody else?" GM President Mark Reuss said in an interview.
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GM, Volkswagen Say Goodbye To Hybrid Vehicles

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  • Hybrids are a short term solution. However, if I was purchasing a vehicle today, I would not buy an all-electric. Why? The range issue.

    1. All-electrics have a shorter range than hybrids.
    2. At the end of the range, it takes longer to charge an all-electric than it does to refill the gas tank on a hybrid.

    Item 1, in and of itself, is not that big an issue, once Item 2 is solved. The problem is that Item 2 is not a solved problem.

    • by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @12:13PM (#59079432) Homepage
      You're refuelling it wrong...

      You don't think of an electric in the same way you do petrol - you 'refuel' every night, not once every few days. Now if you don't yet have easy access to charging at work or home then yes - I may pause for a bit. But mostly you just plug in every night and have full range every morning. Every morning you wake up to the full range of your car being available, rather than running it for 2-4 days and then having to go to a petrol station.

      People seem to have dreams that every day they'll leap to their feet and drive more than 300 miles. For a small minority, that might be true. For the vast majority...no, you don't. I'd like to see some more non-proprietary fast charging (European standard looks reasonable) but on the Tesla network you recharge at a speed of at least 250 miles per hour of charge and much much more in later cars (I have a 2014 model - charges at about 300 miles per hour of charge). You can justifiably say you could pour petrol in to do the same distance in a fraction of the time, but the point is you don't ever actually sit out the full hour - should you find yourself actually needing to top up, you top up for the range required and then go home to do a full overnight charge.

      Like I say - no access to work or home charging? Might be a bit early. But if you do have access, then the problems you're talking about just don't exist. It's because you're drawing a direct analogy between the way you ensure range on an ICE car vs how you ensure range on a pure electric, when in reality that pattern is very different.
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by sconeu ( 64226 )

        Great. And I'm going on a road trip. I have to stop every 250-300 miles and spend the night (note: that's about 4-5 hours). Now what?

        • by sanosuke001 ( 640243 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @12:35PM (#59079538)

          No, as he said, 300 miles per hour of charge. You stop for an hour and get lunch, drive another 300 miles, then stop overnight (600 miles/day is probably overkill for safety even if you think you can drive more). If you have a buddy, stop for dinner then swap, then stop for breakfast, and swap. It's not AS fast, no, but I'd bet down the line swapping batteries will be more likely that directly charging on long trips.

          • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @01:39PM (#59079794)
            The fast recharges are limited to about 50% of battery capacity (a limitation of the technology - batteries don't like having that much charge shoved into them that quickly). So you're stopping every 150 miles, not every 300. Roughly every 2.5 hours at highway speeds.

            Also consider this from the perspective of a highway gas station (rather than from a single driver's perspective as everyone seems to). You can fill a gas tank in about 2 minutes. Call it 4 minutes after adding in time to pull up, futz with the pump, hose, swipe your credit card, and to pull out. A full tank gets you about 450 highway miles on most cars, but let's round it down to 400 to reflect people filling up before the tank is bone dry..

            So that's 100 miles per minute at the gas station. For the EV, the figure is 150 miles per 30 minutes at the recharge station ( I won't even add in all the extra time I added above for the gas vehicle), or 5 miles per minute. In other words, if the current gen EVs were to replace gasoline vehicles for highway trips, there would need to be 20x as many recharging bays as there currently are gas pumps along every highway in order to maintain the same availability as with current gas pumps. If there are fewer recharging bays than that, you're not looking at 30 minutes per 150 miles, you're possibly looking at 60 or 90 or 120 minutes as you wait in line behind other people charging their vehicle(s).

            As I see roughly 5 restaurants or diners per gas stations in highway locations, this also means that unless each recharging station becomes at least 4x larger than current gas stations (8-16 pumps would have to become 32-64 recharge bays minimum) thus necessitating only 5x as many locations, there may not even be a restaurant for you to eat at while you wait for your car to recharge. Currently Tesla is only averaging 8.8 bays per station [tesla.com] (14081 superchargers at 1604 stations). That figure needs to go way, way up for the "eat while you wait for the car to charge" scenario you've given to become realistic.

            The technology still has a ways to go before it can realistically replace ICE vehicles for long road trips (granted you don't gain much from a hybrid on those trips, since most of their energy savings comes from regenerative braking in stop-and-go traffic). The ideal solution would be for people to use EVs for their daily commutes, and rent an ICE vehicle for their long road trips 2-3 times a year. But I've had a hard time convincing people that owning a car is essentially the same as renting. You just take how much you paid for the car, add up the maintenance costs, subtract how much you sell the car for, and divide it by the months owned to get a $ per month figure comparable to renting. Most people seem to think anything they do with the car is free if they own it, so renting a car "costs extra" when it really doesn't. (I've rented a car for my last couple road trips because when I did the math, the rental cost after coupons was less than if I'd put those additional miles on the car I own.)
            • by SoftwareArtist ( 1472499 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @04:22PM (#59080442)

              there would need to be 20x as many recharging bays as there currently are gas pumps along every highway in order to maintain the same availability as with current gas pumps.

              You wouldn't need anything like that many, because most people driving down the highway in their EVs aren't going to stop along the way to recharge. Most of them are driving less than 300 miles a day. When they get to work or get home, they'll plug the car in and find it fully charged when they next get in.

              Driving an EV is really different from driving an ICE. In an ICE, you have to go to the gas station to refuel. That's the only way to do it. In EVs, that's a rare thing to do. You just plug it in at night. Charging stations are only for rare (for most people) road trips. So you don't need nearly so much capacity in them.

            • One thing I've come to realize with EV's is, the rate of growth is limited by so many factors, it's just not even worth discussing a scenario where suddenly, we're "all driving electric vehicles" and overwhelming the charging infrastructure.

              Among other things, the battery production is still not able to keep up. Many auto makers haven't expressed interest in selling a lot of EV's because honestly, they'd have to deal with too big of supply shortages on batteries if they tried.

              I've done road trips almost ha

        • by shilly ( 142940 )

          You don't have to stop overnight every 250 to 300 miles! You have to stop for an hour. I know there are some edge cases where a person might want to drive for 12 hours with only 10minutes break in the whole time, and cover 700+ miles, but c'mon, that's vanishingly rare (and pretty damn dangerous, too). Most people will want at least one decent break for an hour for a meal, if not two. And those breaks provide the time needed to recharge.

          • Depends on the queue to gas up. Stop at most gas stations along a highway and you'll see likely 12-20 pumps and almost never have to queue up with 5m to fill your car. In my albeit limited experience I've never seen more than 6 chargers and while that may be fine now, increase the number of cars trying to use them by 1000% at 1hr a charge and you'll be waiting for quite a while just to get to a charger.

            This is the issue I see in the future.

        • by EvilSS ( 557649 )

          Great. And I'm going on a road trip. I have to stop every 250-300 miles and spend the night (note: that's about 4-5 hours). Now what?

          Do that often? If not, rental cars are still a thing. If you do, then maybe get a traditional IC powered vehicle instead.

        • by Cyberax ( 705495 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @01:24PM (#59079730)

          Great. And I'm going on a road trip. I have to stop every 250-300 miles and spend the night (note: that's about 4-5 hours). Now what?

          This is how I do it: start a road trip with 100% charge, it's enough for about 3 hours of driving (~200 miles with a hefty safety buffer). Then you stop at a supercharger until you get back to 80% (about 30 minutes), this also combines well with a lunch break, so you don't perceive it as a "downtime". Then you drive for another 3 hours (~200 miles).

          At this point you can either plan for another ~20 minute charge to 60% and another 3 hour drive or you look for a hotel with a charging station. You stay in the hotel and charge overnight to 100%, then just rinse and repeat.

          This way you can cover about 600 miles in a day with only about 30 minutes of "wasted" time when you have to actually wait for the car to charge.

        • by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @01:25PM (#59079732)

          Long trips are one area where ICE vehicles handily beat EVs. I'm not sure why people bend over backwards to deny this point. Teslas are not representative of all EVs in terms of range, and charging stations along freeways and highways are not nearly as ubiquitous as gas stations yet.

          That being said, it's worthwhile to look at cost/benefit of owning an ICE just for this one benefit. If you take road trips reasonably often, it might be worth owning a gas-burner. Otherwise, it's not too onerous to rent a car for those trips. But if you're like me and almost never do so, an EV just makes more sense, because I very rarely drive more than 120 miles in a day (my extended family mostly live about 60 miles away), and the majority of the time, it's just my daily commute for contract work, or just the occasional grocery store trip when I'm working from home.

          I've still got lots of years left on my ICE, which is paid off and is still running great, but my next vehicle is almost certainly going to be an EV. I think there are probably lots of cases like mine. I'm also fairly certain there are lots of two-car families as well, where you can split the difference, keeping one ICE for long family hauls, and one EV for the more typical day-to-day commute and in-town driving.

          • I've never rented a car and NOT had it be onerous. I take great care to buy a car I want with the options I want. Rental companies will give you a bare option vehicle. I want to use my own vehicle.
          • by Zobeid ( 314469 )

            Well, there are Teslas and then there are other electric cars. It appears to me that Teslas are already working well as road trip cars for a lot of people, and still getting better as they continue to bump up the range (370 miles on the newest Model S) and build more-and-faster (V3) charging stations. Other car makers aren't there yet. GM and VW and Nissan aren't there yet. They're gonna have to scramble to catch up. That's competition. Or as Lee Iacocca put it: Lead, follow, or get out of the way!

            I gu

      • by olddoc ( 152678 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @12:59PM (#59079624)
        This is the right way to look at it. I never have to stand outside and pump fuel when it is freezing in winter. Recharging actually takes 2 seconds to plug in and 2 seconds to unplug every night. Only on long trips do I have to plan a stop at a Tesla Supercharger and most are not out of the way for where I go. Stops are either 15 minute coffee and email checks or 50 minutes to have a meal. If you regularly have to drive more than 300 miles in a day you should either get paid and be a truck driver or move so you don't have to waste your life away in a car.
      • Well look at the 1%er who has a place to recharge every night. :)
        The reality is that for most people they will not have a place to recharge each night, look at all the cars parked in garages, lots,in the driveway or on the street. Do you really see most businesses, apartment, malls, etc setting up recharging stations and running properly installed and grounded electrical to each of those spots? Even if they did the amount of power that would have to be directed to those areas would require the redoing o
    • Hybrids are a short term solution. However, if I was purchasing a vehicle today, I would not buy an all-electric. Why? The range issue.

      1. All-electrics have a shorter range than hybrids.
      2. At the end of the range, it takes longer to charge an all-electric than it does to refill the gas tank on a hybrid.

      Item 1, in and of itself, is not that big an issue, once Item 2 is solved. The problem is that Item 2 is not a solved problem.

      I could theoretically get one. I just took a job where I am 5 miles from work, and they have solar-panel-covered parking and recharging stations.
      But... I don't want one. I am sure they can be fun, I drove an electric go-kart at a raceway that was a blast. But I really don't want one. They are eerily quiet. And we aren't at the stage where I know where charging stations are located... so if I were to drive 200 miles somewhere... I'd need to make sure there was somewhere to recharge. It's kind of a chic

      • I drove an electric go-kart at a raceway that was a blast.

        If you think an electric go-kart was a blast, you should try one of the newer EVs. Instant acceleration and 0-60 times of 5 seconds or less is intoxicating. You won't care about the lack of noise.

        Stop being so negative and try one!

    • by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @12:33PM (#59079530) Journal
      Plug-in hybrids are great if most of your driving is over (very) short distances, but you do some longer distance driving at unpredictable intervals as well. A PHEV gives you zero emissions driving on (most of) your daily route, without giving up flexibility when you need it. The drawback is that having 2 drive trains adds weight, complexity and cost.

      I'm going all electric for my next vehicle, which should give around 350km of range under crap conditions. That's enough for 99% of my journeys, unless I'd need to visit a client in Germany or friends in France or the UK. In that case I'm looking at a single recharge along the way... which will be completed over a stop for lunch. Using an EV takes a little bit more planning on longer journeys, but that'll become less of an issue. Hopefully the EV after the next one will be able to make use of the new 350kW chargers that are being installed now. That'll put a few 100 km in your tank while you have a coffee.
    • by jwhyche ( 6192 )

      I'm not sure why range is an issue. The answer is pretty obvious standardization and easy replaceable battery packs. Drive 300 miles, pull in to a service station, swap out the battery pack for a fresh one, and off you go. The service station takes the depleted pack, recharges, and uses it for another customer. I know battery packs are pretty heavy, so this will probably mean the return of full service service stations. I don't see this as a real problem.

      Honestly, this shouldn't be a problem.

  • Make one that is a 2 seater sports car type...with range in the ballpark of a gas car and price it in the range of a low end corvette and we'll talk.

    Wish Tesla would do the roadster again.

  • GM's operating strategy has long been to wait for other people to figure out how things are done, then to copy it cheaper, and do more of it. That results in better margins. Everyone else will go to mild hybrid before GM, then GM will do it across their range and get a better deal on the parts. Mild hybrid requires small but good batteries in order to get any decent power from regen, but in the bargain it provides seamless engine stop-start (along with heated catalysts, which also depend on the 48V+ system

  • It makes sense. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @12:29PM (#59079506) Homepage Journal

    Hybrids are internal combustion vehicles that achieve marginal improvements to efficiency over traditional ICE vehicles at the cost of weight and complexity. The improvement is marginal especially when you consider the design compromises hybrid vehicles typically make to achieve high mileage numbers.

    Once the range you can achieve in an EV exceeds what people want to drive in a day, and charging becomes sufficiently ubiquitous, the complexity, cost and weight of having a second, parallel motor system makes hybrids a lot less attractive.

    EVs won't be better than ICE vehicles for every use case any time soon, but where they're good enough they're bound to be better than a similar hybrid.

    • Re:It makes sense. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Comrade Ogilvy ( 1719488 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @12:50PM (#59079602)

      I basically agree. It all comes down to battery technology.

      Gasoline still has ballpark two orders of magnitude better energy density than a battery. Is that enormous weight savings for "fuel" worth the cost and complexity of a small efficient IC engine powering a generator? The answer today is: yes (usually).

      I would further add that from an environmental perspective, my research shows a pretty strong correlation between vehicle total cost of ownership and the total environmental damage. To those ends, I recently bought a car that was a small IC automobile, not even a hybrid. Hybrids and pure electrics look very attractive for the marginal cost per mile, both financially and environmentally, but they are not wins when weighed by total costs.

  • They'll just have to run on non-fossil fuel.
    Like Hydrogen

  • Unfortunately, the infrastructure for rescuing an out-of-fuel vehicle, and charging times when on long cross-county trips, still make purely electric vehicles a step down in utility.

    With a gas or hybrid vehicle you can grab an opportunity that involves travel beyond a single-charge range. With a pure electric you need preparation and planning, or even the time and trouble of renting a specialized vehicle. Situations requiring regular trips beyond the single-charge range are degraded or rendered impractica

    • by Cyberax ( 705495 )

      Heck: If you live in silicon Valley and commute with an EV, but ski at Tahoe or weekend at Reno, you still need separate vehicle.

      No you don't. I do regular Tahoe trips on my Model 3 just fine. There are plenty of superchargers along the way and destination charger locations near Tahoe.

      The only non-trivial route for me last time was the "Loneliest Road in the US" (Highway 50 in Nevada). There are no dedicated chargers there and I had to stop at an RV park to charge.

  • by mschuyler ( 197441 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @12:48PM (#59079596) Homepage Journal

    Off-roading? Racing? Road Trips? EVs don't need to solve extreme cases. They need to accommodate the majority of cases the majority of the time. Do you commute 25 miles each way? The Feds say that is a lengthy commute. EVs solve that issue and any commute that is shorter. Just because EVs don't solve YOUR problem does not mean they can't make a significant contribution. It's not about you; it's about the average case.

  • by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @12:50PM (#59079600)

    GM plans to launch 20 fully electric vehicles world-wide in the next four years, including plug-in models in the U.S. for the Chevy and Cadillac brands.

    I'll believe it when I see it. So far they have brought one to market which I happen to own. The Chevy Bolt EV is a solid first try at an EV but now I can buy the significantly better Tesla Model 3 for similar amounts of money so I find myself asking why they haven't introduced another EV in the last 3 years. The Bolt came out for the 2017 model year and has remained basically unimproved since then aside from some minor feature updates. There is no noise at all about GM bringing another EV of any consequence to market and it's hard to hide that sort of rumor.

    Volkswagen also has committed billions to producing more battery-powered models, including introducing a small plug-in SUV in the U.S. next year and an electric version of its minibus around 2022.

    So the company that got busted for lying to us is making promises. Yeah, show me the vehicles first.

    • by tomhath ( 637240 )

      I find myself asking why they haven't introduced another EV in the last 3 years.

      The market is still way too small. The only thing keeping Tesla afloat is the cash it gets from selling carbon credits to GM and the other big auto makers [techcrunch.com]. They'll let Tesla sell at a loss for a couple more years, then move into the market.

    • Yeah, show me the vehicles first.

      In the same vein, I would add: Show me the battery factory first, otherwise you're not to be taken seriously. You think you're going to sell a couple million EVs per year? You're going to need over 100GWh of battery production per year to meet that goal, which is more than the entire world (including Tesla) currently produces. You don't just buy those batteries off the shelf, you either need your own dedicated factory or a solid, long-term deal in place with a reliable manufacturer. Thus far, very few of th

  • by pgmrdlm ( 1642279 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @12:51PM (#59079606) Journal
    I have read a number of articles where the hearing impared could not detect an EV in city/parking lot situations due to them being so quiet. I went to look to see if this is still the case, and it appears that the auto makers are now creating a vehicle noise at low speeds to address this. Thats good.

    https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/16/13651106/electric-car-noise-nhtsa-rule-blind-pedestrian-safety/ [theverge.com]
    • by vix86 ( 592763 )

      They need to put them on some ICE cars as well then. At low RPMs, some ICE cars are dead silent as well. I've had a few sneak up on me.

  • I can't go to X party as they don't have an outlet for car.

  • by R3d M3rcury ( 871886 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @12:59PM (#59079630) Journal

    Here's an interesting question--what happens to gasoline as this transition takes place?

    I'm one of those people who believes that you should drive whatever suits your needs or desires. If you drive 500 miles regularly, an EV might be too inconvenient. I'm okay with that.

    But I do see the transition happening, whether it's for cost savings, "saving the planet", or whatever.

    So as more and more people switch to electric cars, what happens to the gasoline infrastructure?

    Now the first thing people will say is that, "Oh, gas stations will add chargers!" And that's great. But what about the people who make gasoline? You have some pretty expensive infrastructure to refine oil into gasoline. As fewer people buy gasoline, refiners will produce less gasoline in order to keep the price up. At some point, you have to fix the refinery--parts don't last forever. Then you need to decide whether or not it's actually worth spending the money to fix the refinery to make gasoline if fewer people are buying gasoline.

    Basically, you will start to lose the "economies of scale" for gasoline. So do prices go up, which drives more people into electric cars? Do refiners just get out of the gasoline business to the point that you have more of a monopoly on gasoline production?

    • by Dread Cthulhu ( 5435800 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @01:51PM (#59079840)
      One thing to remember is that refineries produce more than just gasoline out of the crude oil they take in - everything from lubricants, to jet fuel, to feedstock chemicals for plastics gets refined out of the crude. So as long as there is demand for these other petroleum products, there will be plenty of gasoline produced as a byproduct. So I expect stagnant to lowering gasoline prices, at least until people come up with alternatives to those other petroleum products.
  • by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @01:26PM (#59079736)

    Before current hybrid drivers will move to all-electrics, three conditions have to be satisfied:

    1. Is there enough $ESSENTIAL_ELEMENT in the world to produce really large numbers of the batteries you will use?
    2. How long does it take to fully charge the vehicle, and how soon will the chargers you use become generally deployed?
    3. Will your range be at least 300 miles with the AC or heater in use?

  • by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @01:56PM (#59079874)
    I have a Prius that gets 50MPG with a 400+ mile range on the tank. An electric wouldn't work for out of town trips across the country. The only long range electrical solution isn't charging stations - it's replaceable battery stations. So I can drive in, replace the battery, drive out in 10 minutes. Waiting 45 minutes or longer for 80% charge doesn't interest me. Also, electric really doesn't fit the bill when I go into the mountains for a few days. I see plenty of those old gas pumps - forget charging stations - in small old towns.
    Of course when I really want to get away, I drive my crew cab, 1 ton, 4x4 diesel - only way to pull a camper through the mountains.
    Ultimately, EV, Hybrid, or IC - it's what life style you choose. Each has different +/- and "sweet spots".
  • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @02:57PM (#59080106)

    "If I had a dollar more to invest, would I spend it on a hybrid? Or would I spend it on the answer that we all know is going to happen, and get there faster and better than anybody else?" GM President Mark Reuss said in an interview.

    Stop trying to sound like you're leading the electric vehicle change that's been happening. It sounds forced and insincere.

    The General Motors EV1 was an electric car produced and leased by General Motors from 1996 to 1999. While customer reaction to the EV1 was positive, GM believed that electric cars occupied an unprofitable niche of the automobile market, and ended up crushing most of the cars, regardless of protesting customers.

    General Motors EV1 [wikipedia.org]

    You could have led the market and forced others to follow you into the future. You had your foot in the door, you were the first big one with the potential to change everything.

    So stop with the false pretence. You are now just another copycat that has no choice but to enter the present, by force.

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