Exactly, as owner of one of the latest versions of Nissan cars with e-Power, I just can say that it is extremely inefficient, especially during winter, plus it isn't recognised at all as hybrid vehicle in Germany (it misses the "E" at the end of the car plate).
For comparison, the full classic gasoline engine with manual gearbox consumes less gasoline than the e-Power one. This is just some pure greenwashing, that isn't even explained at car dealerships and people can't say anything about it, when you ask for information.
Non-plugin hybrids are just regular gas cars. It would be bizarre to give them any sort of preferential treatment in anything, though their rules are already strange to begin with (giving tax advantages to PHEVs and EREVs, which are almost exclusively used as pure gas cars).
We had the X-Trail AWD version of this. The plus side was getting around 850km to a tank of petrol.
However, the EV-only range was very poor and the engine was quite harsh sounding when it spun up.
Super happy to get rid of it and switch to BEV.
- Nissan's petrol engine is the crossbow, a well optimised generator for onboard battery
- Every other brand's EV is the machine gun. About 4 times as energy efficient as a petrol car when you take into account the lifecycle of the vehicle, so probably more when you talk about a hybrid car.
> Every other brand's EV is the machine gun.
Nissan have decent BEVs, though - the new LEAF is great to drive.
I know the United States is significantly behind the curve on EV adoption, but I really don't understand who would want this, it's the worst of both worlds.
Why bother going to all this effort for an internal combustion engine (crossbow)? Why not spend that money researching 100% EV (machinegun) drive trains?
Its pretty obvious where the future is headed for personal vehicles (yes yes yes I am sure I will get loads of responses where people need to drive 750 miles a day non-stop every day, both ways, towing a boat, up a mountain etc).
It surprises me that these manufacturers like Nissan and Toyota and Honda seem incapable of reacting and changing their product line-up. You can get 100% EV porsches, mercedes, BMWs - hell even Range Rover now and yet these guys are dithering and have basically got only very very half-hearted efforts in EV offerings while apparently trying to pretend its not happening and relying on hybrids.
Meanwhile, at least here in London, I am seeing more and more and more EV BYDs & Jaecoos & MGs etc... so if you care about outward appearances you buy the merc/porsche/etc EV, if you just need a car and don't care what people think you buy the cheap & decent Chinese EV. Toyota, Honda et al don't compete at the luxury end, and they've got nothing to compete with against Chinese EV brands who seem to be taking over the lower end where Toyotas and Nissans etc used to be popular.
We saw the same kind of thing with electronics. I'm old enough to remember Sony being the brand to have. But they never really made to jump to digital (or wherever you want to draw the line).
Problem is, EVs are disruptive. Many car companies don't want them because it involves too much change to how they want to do business. They'll try to change when it's too late.
It's because street parking is banned nationwide and none of big cities in Japan are interested in EVs. There are close to zero will to make EVs viable in Japanese cities, and people aren't buying unviable products, and Japanese automakers which primarily make products for Japanese middle class which somehow magically sell like hotcakes globally therefore aren't making many EVs.
Nissan is a bit of an outlier in that they are a bit more charitable and more invested in electrification, but they can't ignore the Japanese consumer demand that cars need to be able to run on gas. So they do exactly that, and make an EV with a gas engine that works with existing gas stations.
> Why bother going to all this effort for an internal combustion engine (crossbow)?
Because it sells well? Because it's what a significant portion of people want?
> Its pretty obvious where the future is headed for personal vehicles
"Where", yes. "When" is a big question mark. If the transition will take several years to complete, which many bet it will, it makes perfectly sense to offer a car that people is willing to buy in the meanwhile.
The Chinese brands that you mention also offer hybrids: indeed most BYDs I see in the streets have the "DMi" tag, which is BYD's codename for hybrid. And they are investing in fuel engines, too. Only short-sighted euro burocrats think that since EV are the future we should immediately stop selling and innovating fuel cars.
The EV cars in UK have a green panel on the license plate so they're very easy to identify.
FWIW in most European countries I think sales of new fuel cars are scheduled to be banned within the next 5-10 years, so that puts a date on it I guess.
I read a thing recently that in the UK the used price of EVs is soaring now too due to the increase in demand. Diesel especially is really expensive now so people are looking to switch. At least in the UK there are more charging stations now than gas stations - totally viable to drive an EV anywhere and find a charger, you even get e.g. 350kw chargers in grocery store car parks now. I think the transition is well underway - I can't think of a reason you'd not but an EV if you were in the market for a new car in the UK. The only thing I guess is not having off-street charging at home, but more and more lampposts have chargers in them now et. It's only 400 miles between London and Edinburgh (about an 8 hour drive give or take) and some current EVs can do that without stopping.
There is really no excuse for it I think - the range is there, the chargers are there, the competition/manufacturer options are there - apart from just not wanting one for your own personal reasons.
You can get a permit for a gun easily compared to a permit for a modern crossbow in some countries and in others crossbows are e.g. entirely forbidden for hunting.
I think these kinds of vehicles are fine for countries were fast charging networks are still not widespread. I drove a rental X-Trail e-Power AWD a while ago, and fuel economy, while not spectacular, was still great given the quality of the powertrain. Of course a low displacement manual can get better fuel economy, and an electric will be cheaper, but if you are driving 800km on a country with little charging infrastructure, powertrains like this one or Toyota's eCVTs make sense.
>X-Trail e-Power AWD a while ago, and fuel economy, while not spectacular, was still great
10L/100km on highway, worse than cheaper comparably powerful ordinary diesel. Seems like a pointless car, X-Trail 2.0 dCi M9R was better in every possible way.
Where did you get the 10L/100km figure from? I saw closer to 7L/100km when driving it, and the 2.2 diesel on the older X-Trails has about 100 less horsepower.
Machine guns are just paperweights if arrows are dime a dozen but 6.8x51mm is still at advanced stages of development. EV charging in mechanical parking system is still an unsolved problem and gas filling experience remains more than tolerable.
I am always a bit confused by this argument. You have to drive to a gas station to get fuel but it's not okay to drive to a specific place to charge. Most of the gas station where I live already have a few charging points backed by a big battery. Maybe that's not everywhere but I am not sure they are as rare as they are made out to be.
This prompted me to check how the UK Costco rollout of EV chargers is going, which seems to be proceeding slowly and is not all that much of a discount at £0.50/kWh. Type 2 plugs so slowish?
I don't live in the US, but yes. I've seen people get into punch-ups because of the queues (although that happens with gas queues as well). All I'm saying is that queues are not improved by having longer servicing times. If you have the same ratio of cars to fuel pumps / chargers, the one that takes 30 minutes to fill up will be worse.
Most of the public chargers around me are level 2 - hours is correct. Though most are in places where I would expect someone is parking there all day anyway - the parking ramps downtown, campgrounds, and beaches. I don't know what the grocery store with level-2 chargers is thinking though - the range you can get level 2 charging during the typical grocery run isn't worth it. (if the chargers were on the far end where employees park it would make sense, but they are customer parking only)
There are some level 3 chargers, but they are much less common. Maybe your city is different.
Yes, AC chargers aren't meant to be the equivalent of "get gas and get back home". They're sometimes called "destination chargers". You plug your car in because you already need to be there.
If you need to charge the car as fast as possible, you go to a DC charger and you generally spend 5-20 minutes there. In fact, many faster DC chargers will start adding fees for hogging the charger for more than 30 minutes.
Problem is level 3 chargers are a lot less common than level 2 - at least where I live. Some of those chargers are free which is nice when I happen to be in that area anyway, but most are not.
I think a lot more places like grocery stores and restaurants and what not should probably prioritize 50kW-ish DC fast chargers. Not so big you need to radically change the electricity at the property (some systems even have batteries to spread the load out), but still fast enough that customers hanging out for half an hour to a little over an hour will get a very solid charge.
EV charging needs to sort out the one thing they didn't have to innovate on: payment.
All the novel parts of supplying megawatts of power to consumers were sorted out and work perfectly, which is really impressive work! But paying with a credit card is often impossible? And forget about cash. You often need an app, and god forbid you don't have a data connection.
Sadly, it it should be simpler to charge an EV: power distribution is already ubiquitous, much more so than gas distribution.
In practice (in my experience) the EV infrastructure needs a serious central push before we get there. Beyond payment there are a few more things to sort out:
- High capacity charging is nowhere near as common as gas stations are in most of the US (and everywhere else I've been).
- Charging protocols are mostly sorted out via adapters, but residual annoyances remain, some of which won't be fixed soon (the US mostly distributing 2-phase AC while Europe distributes 3-phase drives one of these).
I've been driving a non-Tesla EV for several years now in the US, and have gone on many road trips. I sometimes make a point to try out new DC fast chargers around me, even if I don't really need the charge, just to see what their experience is like with a lot of the newer networks.
I haven't had to use an app to deal with payment for a fast charger in years. Practically all the major networks these days have ways to pay at the dispenser with a credit card.
The last time I used an app to charge was with some chargers at my office which were free for a few hours for tenants in the building, the app was needed to add my car to my approved account and once added it auto-detected and the app wasn't needed.
My car doesn't exactly go to Europe very often, its a pretty challenging drive. So I don't get why Europe having a different plug really makes that big of a difference in the end. Would it be nice if we could just have one world plug? Sure, but not too many cars from North America are going to accidentally find themselves in Europe without much planning.
As for charging protocols and plugs in the US, I've never really had too much of an issue. For a while it was pretty much just choose a non-Tesla charger and it'll be compatible. These days in this mixed period, lots of chargers support NACS and CCS, even Tesla. I got a free adapter from Ford but outside of using it once to test it out I've never used it.
My information is 6 months old: I borrowed an EV to travel around while visiting friends in the US. I've never had any issues paying with a credit card at a gas pump, but had an O(0.1) success rate with the EV charger. But I guess wherever you are the payment is sorted out better.
The mysterious thing to me was why they ever tried to reinvent this part of the procedure. As I said, it was one of the few things they could just copy from the working model.
>The mysterious thing to me was why they ever tried to reinvent this part of the procedure
You definitely have enough info to figure this out, but let me walk you through it.
What is the profit margin on the business of transporting or distributing commodity energy like electricity or a tanker full of gas? Not very good. It's a commodity, so you can't do much to improve your margins without someone else undercutting you.
Modern Businesses in America do not like the small profit margin of selling commodities. They like the "tech" standard of insisting that an app is a "Platform" or community and being able to extract whatever rent you want from it.
So they tried to control a "Platform" through the cars. It somewhat failed because it's finally a bridge too far for consumers, just barely.
Basically, a classic horror story of consumer rights is "What if your ford car only worked with ford gas?" which was not something possible to really do back in the early 1900s, but companies saw an opportunity to do exactly that with EVs, and they don't care that it made things worse and slower to roll out and harmed adoption, because there was a chance of infinite money!
In SoCal at least, public chargers are barely cheaper than gas, even with gas at $6.30/gal. Electric only makes economic sense if you can mostly charge at home.
The entire metal platform that holds the car is moved around like a data tape in a tape library in mechanical systems. A third rail system to handle L1/L2 EV charging do exist, but upgrades aren't common. I think not many are being newly built but there are many operating in ultra dense areas.
The stupid thing is, yes, modern petrol and diesel cars are stupidly efficient[0], it's not uncommon to see 50-60mpg in a golf-sized car almost regardless of whether it's diesel or petrol.
[0] as long as you don't put them in gigantic american trucks, if I read one more american review saying that 20mpg is "pretty decent".......
50-60 miles per U.K. gallon. Or 11-13 miles per litre.
20 miles per us gallon is terrible, but it’s more like 25 miles per U.K. gallon, which isn’t much below what by 1984 Nissan mid sized car used to get 27 years ago.
I tend to use 45mpg/10mpl now, as both my old micra and my newer Skoda got about that. That’s about 37mpg (us).
I had an automatic Micra (2016). It was a gas guzzler in the city, striking at 10l/100km at times. When shopping for a car to replace it, I did check out the 5 speed manual version. That stupidly asks you to rev 3000 RPM in 5th gear at 100 km/h. There is a 6th gear missing there, or a taller fifth: oops, fail! And they thought that someone who wants a manual car won't be needing air conditioning or power windows, etc. the idiotic, outdated thinking that the manual transmission is just an ingredient in making the cheapest possible version of the car, and not somehing that is a special feature to the enthusiast. Double fail ...
Manual 2005 micra which I drove until last January was reliably 6.3l/100km. No aircon but did have electric windows. And a cd player.
Manual skoda kamiq which I drove until May was about 6l/100km
Those are real “how many miles did I drive, how many litres did I put in to fill the tank” figuresc although tend not to do a lot of inner city driving - because that’s what public transports for.
dluan · · focus · HN ↗
madduci · · focus · HN ↗
For comparison, the full classic gasoline engine with manual gearbox consumes less gasoline than the e-Power one. This is just some pure greenwashing, that isn't even explained at car dealerships and people can't say anything about it, when you ask for information.
Works like (?) an EV, it isn't an EV.
teo_zero · · focus · HN ↗
You surely mean that it is not recognized as plug-in hybrid vehicle.
formerly_proven · · focus · HN ↗
Foivos · · focus · HN ↗
indemnity · · focus · HN ↗
madduci · · focus · HN ↗
teo_zero · · focus · HN ↗
alex_duf · · focus · HN ↗
- Nissan's petrol engine is the crossbow, a well optimised generator for onboard battery
- Every other brand's EV is the machine gun. About 4 times as energy efficient as a petrol car when you take into account the lifecycle of the vehicle, so probably more when you talk about a hybrid car.
lol768 · · focus · HN ↗
Nissan have decent BEVs, though - the new LEAF is great to drive.
I know the United States is significantly behind the curve on EV adoption, but I really don't understand who would want this, it's the worst of both worlds.
mattlondon · · focus · HN ↗
Why bother going to all this effort for an internal combustion engine (crossbow)? Why not spend that money researching 100% EV (machinegun) drive trains?
Its pretty obvious where the future is headed for personal vehicles (yes yes yes I am sure I will get loads of responses where people need to drive 750 miles a day non-stop every day, both ways, towing a boat, up a mountain etc).
It surprises me that these manufacturers like Nissan and Toyota and Honda seem incapable of reacting and changing their product line-up. You can get 100% EV porsches, mercedes, BMWs - hell even Range Rover now and yet these guys are dithering and have basically got only very very half-hearted efforts in EV offerings while apparently trying to pretend its not happening and relying on hybrids.
Meanwhile, at least here in London, I am seeing more and more and more EV BYDs & Jaecoos & MGs etc... so if you care about outward appearances you buy the merc/porsche/etc EV, if you just need a car and don't care what people think you buy the cheap & decent Chinese EV. Toyota, Honda et al don't compete at the luxury end, and they've got nothing to compete with against Chinese EV brands who seem to be taking over the lower end where Toyotas and Nissans etc used to be popular.
vachina · · focus · HN ↗
You got your answer.
benj111 · · focus · HN ↗
We saw the same kind of thing with electronics. I'm old enough to remember Sony being the brand to have. But they never really made to jump to digital (or wherever you want to draw the line).
Problem is, EVs are disruptive. Many car companies don't want them because it involves too much change to how they want to do business. They'll try to change when it's too late.
numpad0 · · focus · HN ↗
Nissan is a bit of an outlier in that they are a bit more charitable and more invested in electrification, but they can't ignore the Japanese consumer demand that cars need to be able to run on gas. So they do exactly that, and make an EV with a gas engine that works with existing gas stations.
teo_zero · · focus · HN ↗
Because it sells well? Because it's what a significant portion of people want?
> Its pretty obvious where the future is headed for personal vehicles
"Where", yes. "When" is a big question mark. If the transition will take several years to complete, which many bet it will, it makes perfectly sense to offer a car that people is willing to buy in the meanwhile.
The Chinese brands that you mention also offer hybrids: indeed most BYDs I see in the streets have the "DMi" tag, which is BYD's codename for hybrid. And they are investing in fuel engines, too. Only short-sighted euro burocrats think that since EV are the future we should immediately stop selling and innovating fuel cars.
mattlondon · · focus · HN ↗
FWIW in most European countries I think sales of new fuel cars are scheduled to be banned within the next 5-10 years, so that puts a date on it I guess.
I read a thing recently that in the UK the used price of EVs is soaring now too due to the increase in demand. Diesel especially is really expensive now so people are looking to switch. At least in the UK there are more charging stations now than gas stations - totally viable to drive an EV anywhere and find a charger, you even get e.g. 350kw chargers in grocery store car parks now. I think the transition is well underway - I can't think of a reason you'd not but an EV if you were in the market for a new car in the UK. The only thing I guess is not having off-street charging at home, but more and more lampposts have chargers in them now et. It's only 400 miles between London and Edinburgh (about an 8 hour drive give or take) and some current EVs can do that without stopping.
There is really no excuse for it I think - the range is there, the chargers are there, the competition/manufacturer options are there - apart from just not wanting one for your own personal reasons.
But hey each to your own.
baq · · focus · HN ↗
benj111 · · focus · HN ↗
fleroviumna · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
w4der · · focus · HN ↗
rasz · · focus · HN ↗
10L/100km on highway, worse than cheaper comparably powerful ordinary diesel. Seems like a pointless car, X-Trail 2.0 dCi M9R was better in every possible way.
lmz · · focus · HN ↗
w4der · · focus · HN ↗
rasz · · focus · HN ↗
numpad0 · · focus · HN ↗
BadBadJellyBean · · focus · HN ↗
lmz · · focus · HN ↗
bronson · · focus · HN ↗
pjc50 · · focus · HN ↗
lmz · · focus · HN ↗
bronson · · focus · HN ↗
lmz · · focus · HN ↗
Uvix · · focus · HN ↗
Toutouxc · · focus · HN ↗
bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
There are some level 3 chargers, but they are much less common. Maybe your city is different.
Toutouxc · · focus · HN ↗
If you need to charge the car as fast as possible, you go to a DC charger and you generally spend 5-20 minutes there. In fact, many faster DC chargers will start adding fees for hogging the charger for more than 30 minutes.
bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
vel0city · · focus · HN ↗
dguest · · focus · HN ↗
All the novel parts of supplying megawatts of power to consumers were sorted out and work perfectly, which is really impressive work! But paying with a credit card is often impossible? And forget about cash. You often need an app, and god forbid you don't have a data connection.
Sadly, it it should be simpler to charge an EV: power distribution is already ubiquitous, much more so than gas distribution.
In practice (in my experience) the EV infrastructure needs a serious central push before we get there. Beyond payment there are a few more things to sort out:
- High capacity charging is nowhere near as common as gas stations are in most of the US (and everywhere else I've been).
- Charging protocols are mostly sorted out via adapters, but residual annoyances remain, some of which won't be fixed soon (the US mostly distributing 2-phase AC while Europe distributes 3-phase drives one of these).
vel0city · · focus · HN ↗
I haven't had to use an app to deal with payment for a fast charger in years. Practically all the major networks these days have ways to pay at the dispenser with a credit card.
The last time I used an app to charge was with some chargers at my office which were free for a few hours for tenants in the building, the app was needed to add my car to my approved account and once added it auto-detected and the app wasn't needed.
My car doesn't exactly go to Europe very often, its a pretty challenging drive. So I don't get why Europe having a different plug really makes that big of a difference in the end. Would it be nice if we could just have one world plug? Sure, but not too many cars from North America are going to accidentally find themselves in Europe without much planning.
As for charging protocols and plugs in the US, I've never really had too much of an issue. For a while it was pretty much just choose a non-Tesla charger and it'll be compatible. These days in this mixed period, lots of chargers support NACS and CCS, even Tesla. I got a free adapter from Ford but outside of using it once to test it out I've never used it.
dguest · · focus · HN ↗
My information is 6 months old: I borrowed an EV to travel around while visiting friends in the US. I've never had any issues paying with a credit card at a gas pump, but had an O(0.1) success rate with the EV charger. But I guess wherever you are the payment is sorted out better.
The mysterious thing to me was why they ever tried to reinvent this part of the procedure. As I said, it was one of the few things they could just copy from the working model.
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
mrguyorama · · focus · HN ↗
You definitely have enough info to figure this out, but let me walk you through it.
What is the profit margin on the business of transporting or distributing commodity energy like electricity or a tanker full of gas? Not very good. It's a commodity, so you can't do much to improve your margins without someone else undercutting you.
Modern Businesses in America do not like the small profit margin of selling commodities. They like the "tech" standard of insisting that an app is a "Platform" or community and being able to extract whatever rent you want from it.
So they tried to control a "Platform" through the cars. It somewhat failed because it's finally a bridge too far for consumers, just barely.
Basically, a classic horror story of consumer rights is "What if your ford car only worked with ford gas?" which was not something possible to really do back in the early 1900s, but companies saw an opportunity to do exactly that with EVs, and they don't care that it made things worse and slower to roll out and harmed adoption, because there was a chance of infinite money!
ak6te · · focus · HN ↗
pjc50 · · focus · HN ↗
I'm not familiar with this; don't you just plug it in?
numpad0 · · focus · HN ↗
gambiting · · focus · HN ↗
[0] as long as you don't put them in gigantic american trucks, if I read one more american review saying that 20mpg is "pretty decent".......
hdgvhicv · · focus · HN ↗
20 miles per us gallon is terrible, but it’s more like 25 miles per U.K. gallon, which isn’t much below what by 1984 Nissan mid sized car used to get 27 years ago.
I tend to use 45mpg/10mpl now, as both my old micra and my newer Skoda got about that. That’s about 37mpg (us).
kazinator · · focus · HN ↗
hdgvhicv · · focus · HN ↗
Manual skoda kamiq which I drove until May was about 6l/100km
Those are real “how many miles did I drive, how many litres did I put in to fill the tank” figuresc although tend not to do a lot of inner city driving - because that’s what public transports for.