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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
- 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".......
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.
Works like (?) an EV, it isn't an EV.
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.
The EV range is just 3km for me. Very much a joke
> it isn't recognised at all as hybrid vehicle in Germany
You surely mean that it is not recognized as plug-in hybrid vehicle.
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).
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.
7L mixed cycle, stay on highway and you get 10 because no recuperation and 250kg heavier.
Are you comparing (hybrid) gasoline figures to diesel on a liter per km basis? What about cost per km now that diesel prices have shot up?
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.
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.
That's encouraging, about the payment.
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!
The working model has less data tracking
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.
You can usually get gas and get back home in under ten minutes, versus hours to get to an EV place and charge.
Hours? Is this a joke?
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.
The queues can get bad if there are too few chargers.
You ever gone to Costco Gas? Often queued up the block.
And they fill up in a few minutes. Now try the same queue length when it takes 30 minutes to fill up.
Why? I've never seen that queue length for EVs. Have you?
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?
> EV charging in mechanical parking system is still an unsolved problem
I'm not familiar with this; don't you just plug it in?
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.
Could you please elaborate what is crossbow and what is machine guns in your metaphor?
Not OP, but I'm going to guess:
- 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.
I think they mean they're polishing a turd.
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.
> 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.
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.
Japanese brands’ customers are typically the US, and Americans don’t like EVs.
You got your answer.
I don't think that's the only element.
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.
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.
Your point? In some countries it's easier to get a cross bow.
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".......
[dead]