Help me pro/con/weighted-thingy ICE vs EV vs Hybrid vs Plug-In Hybrid

We are a multiple car household and  a single car or single car per person situation is different

Im not a fan of fully electric, me and my wive are kinda preppers and I dont like the idea of not having access to electricity and not being able to get somewhere. It wouldnt really matter at this point, because we could always take a different car, but still. The same could be said for gasoline, but I can and do store gasoline, nothing crazy but enough where I always have a full tank ready to drop in.

I do think her Volt is a good compromise. 90% of the time, in her use, it functions as a fully electric car, but when needed she has the added range of the ICE.

alfadriver said:

  But for that to equal ICE + fuel costs without a tax break, it will have to be pretty significant.

I have to go back to my experience with the Bolt. From late 2019 until now, the Bolt has had no tax credits left (GM had sold too many Volts and Bolts and Spark EVs to qualify for credits anymore). But, from late '19 to the facelifted models in '22, you could buy a new Bolt from $20-30k, depending on trim and options. My well equipped LT was $25k. for a 200hp/266 lb ft hatchback. That's pretty well price/performance parity with the MINI Cooper, Veloster, and GTI that were the same size and performance class as the Bolt. That was the everyday, typical ATP with no hoops to jump through. If you were a Costco member, you could drop another $3k off of that.

The Base Lightning is well equipped (better than the XLT version of the truck) and yet costs a bit less than the XLT version. Again, price parity. And that's before tax credits (that the Ford should still qualify for). I really don't know what else you want to see...

RevRico said:

Stupid question time.

What the hell is a PHEV?

I started seeing badges in the early 2000s, mostly on Subaru appliance products. Then it seemed like the term disappeared for a while, and now it's back, although it seems to be interchanged with any measure of better efficiency.

My Ranger was tagged LEV, for low emissions vehicle, so it can't mean "pretty high emissions vehicle". 

Pretty high efficiency vehicle? Partial hybrid escape velocity?

I think you're thinking of "PZEV" which is "Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle" (IIRC, which doesn't make a lot of sense).

This is an oversimplification but a PHEV (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle) is basically a hybrid you can plug in and drive on the electric motor only for X amount of miles. So if your commute or regular driving habits are short enough, you can basically get around without ever using the gas motor.

At this point there is so much variance between manufacturers and models I don't think that it's fair to do a comparison across types. You really need to go model by model to see what fits your needs best. I'm waiting for a cheap used Porsche Taycan to show up on the market. ....It may be a while before I go electric.

In reply to pointofdeparture :

I believe PZEV indicates that it does create pollution, but less than a figure that roughly correlates to the pollution generated by the average power plant to power an EV.

So it pollutes (and thus isn't a ZEV) but it creates less overall pollution than a true ZEV does, given a few assumptions and fudge factors.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

I have discovered, to my dismay, that Brembo calipers are not immune to sticking.  The pads can still rust in place.

 Pad hardware service is something we charge .5 hour per axle.  And it is one thing to hammer the pads out of a slider caliper carrier, how do you get seized pads out of a fixed caliper?

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

PZEV indicates a car was designed to minimize "evaporative" emissions - the kind that occur when refueling or turning off a car, or until the cat warms up and takes over. Nothing to do with CO2 though. 

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

Yeah, it ultimately makes sense technically, I just find the term "Partial Zero" at face value to be some incredible 4D marketing speak.

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

In reply to Keith Tanner :

I have discovered, to my dismay, that Brembo calipers are not immune to sticking.  The pads can still rust in place.

 Pad hardware service is something we charge .5 hour per axle.  And it is one thing to hammer the pads out of a slider caliper carrier, how do you get seized pads out of a fixed caliper?

Brembo and multi-piston are not synonymous :) 

I've never had a set of pads rust to my calipers. But I would expect that you would hammer them in the likely direction of removal. Or pry. I'm sure you can figure it out, lots of cars come with multi-piston calipers and have for some time. Heck, my 1985 Vanagon had them. On non-vented rotors.

alfadriver said:

Keith Tanner said:

In reply to alfadriver :

There's service in there as well if you're going to look at TCO.

Battery prices have been dropping for years. It's not a matter of the one big magical breakthrough (the EV equivalent of the 100 mpg carburetor) but of optimization and production capacity. The purchase price delta is getting awfully small.

I'm not sure how much more optimization can happen with the current chemistry.  There's some changes to it- getting the cobalt out would be a huge one.  And the theories of solid electrolytes.  But for that to equal ICE + fuel costs without a tax break, it will have to be pretty significant.

Not sure why service is included in my costs- for the most part, they would add one fill up every 5-10k miles.  Hardly significant.  Other than that, service is the same- brakes, tires, etc.

I'll finish up and go away after I point out that I've still not seen the viable path, even though it will be coming.  Hope it happens, just can't see it, yet.

If you're looking at TCO, service is a thing. Not just an oil change every 5000 miles (which is going to cost more than one fill up, you can't even buy the oil for that these days) but cooling system maintenance, fluids in the transmission and differential, belts, filters, etc. Heck, on my pickup you have to take the EGR system apart and hammer out the carbon as part of regular scheduled service. The more you drive, the more the TCO will start to diverge. TCO studies have been done by a wide variety of folks. Consumer Reports, for example, figures the lifetime savings are $6-10k despite the higher buy-in (full report).

The cost of battery packs has dropped by something like 85% in the past decade without a major chemistry change. There are still optimizations involved in how the cells are packaged and managed - just like internal combustion engines have managed dramatic improvements over the past 20 years without any real changes in the fundamental technology despite a century of previous development, I expect we'll see the same with batteries as we're already moving down that path.

pointofdeparture said:

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

Yeah, it ultimately makes sense technically, I just find the term "Partial Zero" at face value to be some incredible 4D marketing speak.

I believe it was born from an EV mandate that the automakers said "......yeah, how do you spell 'way'?"

" W A Y ?"

"See, there's no F in 'way'.  But if you figure that charging an EV would make X amount of pollution per mile, we can make some ICE vehicles that are cleaner than that."

Now, granted, these figures were from when EVs were basically lead-acid monstrosities, and some people were taking liquid sodium seriously as a battery technology (have to keep them over 600F or they would freeze, destroying the battery), and renewable energy was limited to hydroelectric and the solar panels some nerds put up over their commune...

pointofdeparture said:

Yeah, it ultimately makes sense technically, I just find the term "Partial Zero" at face value to be some incredible 4D marketing speak.

Actually it's beaucratese, not marketing speak.  It's a "Partial (Zero Emissions Vehicle)", not a "(Partial Zero) Emissions Vehicle".

In the mid 90s, California imposed a mandate on the minimum number of "Zero Emissions Vehicles" every manufacturer was required to sell.  This was... optimistic.  Battery tech wasn't up to it, and it wasn't really possible to build a real ZEV at that point (GM did the EV1, but it was heavily compromised and was not really a practical car except for very niche applications).  It was supposed to phase in over several years, got pushed back a few times, but finally it became evident that it just wasn't going to happen in that time frame.

So they introduced a "Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle".  Essentially this is a car whose emissions were so low that it was ruled to count towards the ZEV requirements, although only partially.  So for instance if you sold two PZEVs, that counted as one ZEV, because the net pollution was the same as one ZEV and one normal car.  (I don't know exactly what the ratio was, might have been 2:1, 3:1, 3.14159:1, but that's the general idea).

In reply to pointofdeparture :

Yes, that makes sense for the time period and the lack of cords coming from apartment buildings where the cars were. 

Thank you for the insight.

NYC tracked annual maintenance costs of some of the vehicles in their fleet and released the data a couple of years ago. I find it really interesting to compare the different versions of the same car (ICE Fusion/Hybrid Fusion/PHEV Fusion or ICE Focus/EV Focus)

It's pretty clear that maintenance costs decrease as the amount of electrification increases (although the ICE Taurus beating out the hybrid Fusion and the PHEV Volt is unexpected). This should only be used as a single data point too. I'd imagine a vehicle in the NYC fleet sees very different usage than a commuter in Missouri.

After putting about 35k on my Fusion PHEV I'm really impressed with the overall concept. I drive about 10-12k miles per year and so far a bit over half of my driving is done as an EV with just 18-21miles of EV range depending on conditions. To me, hauling around an ICE powertrain that isn't used very often isn't much different than hauling around a bunch of extra battery capacity that isn't used very often in a full BEV. There's financial and environmental waste in both scenarios. At least with the PHEV, I get the majority of EV benefits (lower operating costs, greatly reduced environmental impact, fueling up so infrequently that I don't pay attention to fuel prices any more, etc) with lower buy in and no range anxiety. If environmental concerns are a priority, then I think there's also a reasonable argument that PHEVs can have a more widespread and immediate impact than full BEVs too. But that's more from a society wide perspective than individual.

So all of that being said, I think my ideal PHEV would probably have 40-50 miles of EV range, a liquid cooled battery, and a better way to hide the battery to avoid too much encroachment on passenger or cargo space. We all want to have our cake and eat it too I guess.

Ultimately, this conversation comes down to very unique situations and individual priorities. How will you use the vehicle? How much EV range would you need? How often are you likely to exceed that EV range? Is the motivation for the purchase purely financial, or is there an environmental aspect to it? What's your access to charging like? How does your location impact the costs (Tax rebates, annual fees for EV ownership, electric rates, etc)?

In reply to Jesse Ransom :

  You have one fundamental issue wrong.  Range.  I just spent 17 hours driving from Minnesota to Virginia.  Looking up just the Tesla Sites  I could  have reached this spot in 18 hours and 27 minutes. ( now I have to kill 7 hours until he's home)  Not exactly a range limitation.  

 I understand what your asking, but I doubt you can spread sheet your way out of the question. 
    The volume of offerings is being overwhelmed  by the number of manufactures. Compounded by next year, next quarter, next month.  
    Then the individual situation.  Live in an  older apartment complex without reasonable charging possibility?  Private home with plenty of potential charging?  Rural with your own solar, wind?  New used? Purchase, rent, lease, cash? 
    Finally, your situation?  Career, job, gig?  What happens if you're fired,  laid off, quit?  Change companies, move, get a divorce, get married, have an affair, turn gay, get sick, die? 
  That's just a tiny fraction of the multiple variations that I came up without really any thought.  Now the life of transportation vehicles is between 10-20 years.  Put all those permutations in there. 
   
 

In reply to STM317 :

I would disagree strongly that hauling around a spare powertrain is just like having a little more battery capacity. The extra battery brings no extra complexity, just incrementally more cost and volume. The extra ICE is a huge amount of extra complexity with a whole new maintenance regimen and failure modes. Some of those failure modes are tied to infrequent use. PHEVs make sense in some scenarios but they're quite a bit different than a long range EV.  

In reply to Keith Tanner :

That's fair. I didn't mean to imply that a PHEV is the same as a BEV. There is more complexity with the ICE in the PHEV. What I meant is that both the ICE in the PHEV and extra battery capacity in the BEV represent wastefulness. And waste pretty much always has financial and environmental resource costs. Both are sitting there being hauled around, not being used outside of some edge cases. And if I'm buying a vehicle with a component that's only used on edge cases, I'd prefer it to be an engine that can be refueled more quickly and easily than battery capacity. There's obviously a trade off there with the ICE needing more maintenance than the battery capacity. But the battery capacity comes from a larger amount of precious resources. Nothing is perfect. Everything is a compromise of some sort. It seems like this thread is all about discussing and weighing the various compromises of each powertrain.

I recently ran the numbers on a Gen2 Prius, Gen3 Prius, and a Gen1 Volt against our fleet.  Happy to share the spreadsheet with my model, assumptions, etc. with anyone who's interested.  We do a lot of in-town running currently in two vehicles (Pilot and Odyssey) that get about 15-17 MPG in town (actual).  We're not in a position to purchase new, so a pure EV was ruled out pretty early on.  The question I was trying to answer was would adding a more efficient vehicle save us money overall.  The answer for right now was no.

A few conclusions I drew:

- Purchasing another car (even a used car) wasn't really going to save any $$$ when you factored in the purchase cost, taxes, DMV fees, etc.  It really only made sense to get into this when we're either swapping out another car, or have made the decision we need to add another vehicle to the fleet.  We have two teenagers who will be new drivers in the next 2 years, so we'll likely be adding a vehicle at some point in our future.

- The Prius and Volt came out surprisingly similar when it came to cost.  I didn't factor in the cost of a charger, and it was a little tough to estimate exactly how many kwh per charge (I took the number off of a forum post).  I'm guessing maintenance would be a wash between the two.  I like the fact that both have the ability to be used on a long trip with little to no penalty (i.e. no range anxiety in the equation).

- I didn't factor maintenance costs into the equation, but I think any of the more fuel efficient cars would have had cheaper running costs (less brake use, smaller tire sizes, etc.) than our current fleet.  Maintenance costs are a little tough to predict over a short time frame, as it depends on what wears out.  Because I was looking short-term, I ignored these, but over the longer term, I think these would favor the more efficient vehicles.

Based on what I saw, I cooled on purchasing anything additional in the hope of saving $$$.  There were some other thoughts I had about plug-ins taking up a garage bay that would normally be reserved for another vehicle, etc.  I've love to try something out now as an experiment for the future, but there wasn't enough of a cost-savings to be able to really justify it.  I'd love to make the jump to a full EV, but we're just not there financially yet.

For us right now, it would be between a Prius and a Volt if I were adding another car to the fleet and trying to factor cost savings into the equation. Both get decent safety ratings, and I think would improve our running cost situation.  In our case, though, the extra room of the Prius would likely give it the nod over the Volt (it seats 5 vs. 4 and seems to have more space in general), but on paper, the Volt is the one that's more interesting to me.

I'm a pretty big DIY-er, so if we were making a decision I'd want to understand how much I could DIY on that vehicle.  I really like the idea of a Tesla, but I'm not sure how crazy I am about how much I could actually work on one.  Maybe that would be offset by the fact that they need less maintenance, but I at least like having the option of working on it myself.

dj06482 (Forum Supporter) said:

For us right now, it would be between a Prius and a Volt if I were adding another car to the fleet and trying to factor cost savings into the equation. Both get decent safety ratings, and I think would improve our running cost situation.  In our case, though, the extra room of the Prius would likely give it the nod over the Volt (it seats 5 vs. 4 and seems to have more space in general), but on paper, the Volt is the one that's more interesting to me.

Perhaps not in your price range yet, but the Gen 2 Volt seats 5, has longer EV range than the Gen 1, and uses regular unleaded fuel for the ICE instead of Premium.

I've had a Gen1 Volt for 6 years now. I bought it at 2 years old, with 29k miles.

In that 6 years, I've put 100k miles on it. 

When I bought it I was driving between 35 - 70 miles (each way), depending on which plant I was going to. Each plant has 6.6kW level 2 EVSEs, and when I bought my car work was also giving employees an EVSE for home.

I was also being paid mileage when I went to the further plant.

I put together a spreadsheet comparing the TCO of the 2007 Mazda3 I had to the 2013 Volt. With the free electricity, higher mileage when using gas, and the mileage checks I was getting it was cheaper to have a Volt than my (paid off) Mazda3.

I've done 3 oil changes and had 2 sets of tires put on. The Volt really uses regen braking a lot, so I have not needed to replace pads or rotors yet.

As far as repairs go, I replaced both radiators (one leaked, and both had to come out to replace it). The charge port housing cracked, and the car wouldn't charge until I changed it out. I will soon need new CV joints and at least one front wheel bearing. It's probably also near time for new struts and shocks.

Full EV is appealing, and when plug-in Mavericks or Gladiators start coming up second hand I'll get one.

In reply to STM317 :

This response is in no way mean to malign the poster or the ideas in the post.  The wording of the post struck me in such a way, I wanted to share.  STM317 states that he doesn't want to be hauling around a component that is not used outside edge cases.  There has been a lot of posts around edge cases, extra complexity, extra volume, trade offs etc.  If most people travel less than 40 miles per day, how much extra volume is being carried around today just to meet the in case I need it...