I actually really wish Toyota kept pushing their plug in hybrids. The Rav4 Prime get 40 miles on its battery and 40 mpg as a small suv is impressive plus 600 miles worth of gas in it. My neighbor pretty much uses most of the battery during his commute, charges it and uses the battery coming back. He can take it on long road trips without any stops too.

There was a moment in 2017 when I was sure the GM Volt would usher in an age of series hybrids with larger and larger batteries. Then Tesla released the M3 and GM released the Bolt and the Volt was subsequently discontinued.

There must be some solid reason as to why mid-capacity batteries in a hybrid don't make economic sense for car companies.

Batteries getting cheaper and required emissions equipment getting more expensive and complex have made PHEVs a tough market. For most small and mid sized cars and crossovers the cost of equipping a full ICE drivetrain along with a reasonably sized battery and electric motor drivetrain pencils out to about the same price they can make a full battery electric car for, especially when pure BEVs tend to have higher government incentives compared to PHEVs (varies by location).

Packaging is also a big downside. Fitting a 10-20 kW battery and a full combustion drivetrain takes a lot of space, so BEVs with packaging advantages over even pure ICE cars priced around the same number suddenly look a lot more attractive to the potential buyers who overlap a lot between PHEVs and BEVs.

With clever engineering a PHEV doesn't really need a "whole drivetrain". You can use the fact that you have a motor and a big battery to solve a ton of problems that ICE engines typically have.

To make an ICE efficient, you want to give it a big transmission with a lot of gears so it stays in peak efficiency RP, undersize it, and put a big turbocharger on. This produces a relatively heavy drivetrain that has lag when you put your foot down.

When you have an electric engine and battery, you can take the same small engine, but instead of a transmission, you just steal energy and put it in the battery when you don't need power and give it back instantly when you put your foot down. This removes almost all the weight and complexity of the transmission, keeps your engine at peak RPM, and gives you the responsiveness of an EV.

But the engineering cost to do all that is very expensive and unique, two things car makers hate and avoid at all cost. There is a reason the long discontinued Volt is still the best PHEV around and only BMW i3 has ever had your proposed layout. No one else has been willing to spend the money required to really optimize a PHEV and i3 could use more power getting up hills than the engine could generate, so your battery % could drop with the engine running. The OEMs want a 'good enough' PHEV to qualify for subsidies with minimal spend and allocate all the real resources to BEVs since they see the end of combustion.

Plus it's not just the mechanicals. You still need a gas tank, exhaust, catalytic converter and all the other ancillaries that come with combustion. That all adds to the bill of materials, engineering and assembly complexity, and packaging constraints.

> The OEMs want a 'good enough' PHEV to qualify for subsidies with minimal spend and allocate all the real resources to BEVs since they see the end of combustion.

I think a lot of this comes from seeing PHEV as "worse EV" rather than "better ICE". Car manufacturers see their business as building ICEs and EVs as a weird distraction that you have to throw money into as basically a PR expense (although this has started to change in the last couple years). The engineering cost here is expensive but not especially unique since it could pretty easily apply to the entire ICE fleet. The fact that the Prius has existed for 25 years, but most cars sold today don't have regenerative braking is kind of crazy. It's not like OEMs haven't put a ton of engineering into ICEs, they just haven't considered hybrids as "real engineering".

Except no cars do that. That's called a serial hybrid, which never shipped, unless you count oddballs like the BMW i3, with the optional "range extender".

GM Volt is a series hybrid. Arguably the best hybrid ever made.

The Prius prime already gets about half way there.

I read a review of a prototype BMW mini. The turbine (fixed RPM) + batteries seemed like a great combination. Plenty of HP for highway cruising, plenty of battery+AWD for great acceleration. Turbines are efficient, crazy small for the HP, and have few moving parts. The downsize is having a fixed RPM, which would normally make them unacceptable for a car.

Sadly it never made it to market.

Mostly that two full drivetrains are expensive, heavy, and labor intensive to install. You end up with the worst of both worlds.

BTW, the volt was advertised/promoted as a serial hybrid, which was a really interesting idea ... right up till it shipped and it wasn't.

The reason is because hybrid drive trains don't make sense, as evs get cheaper. I suppose there is less demand. I was hoping for a car with 100 miles ev range and 250 more miles gas range. Then you get a lot of weight from two drive trains and the batteries.

If you've got 40 miles of range when it's new and you're doing a full cycle of the battery twice a day, won't the battery basically be dead weight within 3 years or so?

that's not how car batteries work. phone batteries suck because they are incredibly space and weight constrained and they're too small to effectively include thermal management. Toyota warrentees their hybrid vehicle batteries for 10 years/150k miles for 30% range degredation. after that, since it's a relatively small battery some looking around suggests that the cost of an out of warrentee replacement is roughly $4000, and needing the replacement is relatively rare over the life of the vehicle

Not only is Toyota's warranty on Prius batteries quite good, a good chunk of the battery issues with older Priuses come down to corroded terminals. A dealership will happily throw a new battery in there for a few grand, but a good indie hybrid mechanic knows to try the cheap and easy fix of cleaning the terminals before replacing the battery (and will recommend reconditioned battery packs for a serious $$ savings)

Only if a "full cycle" is aggressively draining the battery. More likely, that 40 miles is a safe amount of discharge for the pack.

Been driving our Rav4 PHEV for 2 years soon. My wife drains the battery once a day on her way to work. We still get 65+ km (40 miles) in winter and over 80km (50 miles) in summer, driving mostly in the city.

Heads up displays are common for most carmakers (maybe apart from cheapest ones like Dacia or chinese brands), but they are always a premium equipment for (big) extra charge.

Our bmw 5 series from 2014 has it. It is amazing tech, easily the best improvement for me in car driving in past 2 decades. Constant visual contact with road and surroundings, while being aware of my current speed to the level of single kmh, speed limit, car navigation, switching songs/volume with knob on steering wheel, perfectly readable in all conditions and never obtrusive. I just dont look inside the car anymore. The problem is when I drive car without it, it feels severely lacking and ancient (like driving long stretches on highways and a lot of speed radars without cruise control).

Yeah, I meant it for normal tier cars. There's a lot of high end stuff available if you pay $$$$$, but not for an average driver.

Well I paid for it 20% of the price of new, 6 years old with 90k km on it. Even if I had to invest another 20k into it on repairs (which I wouldn't and I won't), its so much better value than new ones. After 1.5 years and 20k km, seems like aircon died (getting it fixed soon) but that's it.

I'd never buy a new car, price/value compared to used ones is ridiculously bad, not grokking who does that unless its like 1-5% of their annual salary. Even then its just throwing tons of money away. Electric cars seem to me much worse in this, hopefully this changes over time.

So no ultra expensive cars, you can have it for the price of really basic new cars (if I ignore maintenance but this can be managed by not using official repair shops, which is good idea anyway since they just love swapping whole expensive blocs instead of fixing actual problems). On top of massively better crash security, comfort, proper fun driving etc.

Because on average you'll pay the same in repairs or replacement compared to a more recent car. You got lucky, and that's ok. But the prices aren't completely made up. Your BMW costs a lot less, because the expected average time it will survive is low. Anecdote != data and all that.

On the other hand, having an ex-demo car from a dealer meant no silly markup and when the transmission fell apart after 4 years, I got it replaced for free instead of paying thousands to an independent shop. There are pros and cons.

(And yes, completely new cars have silly markup, but used ones with low mileage don't)

Corvettes had huds 20 years ago. I have never understood why it isn't mainstream.

The Toyotas BZ4BX would like to differ. After it recovers from the recent recall, that is.

Give them another generation or two, and they might reach the point you're describing. But they ain't there yet.

I'd really like to meet the marketing genius who decided to name the car "BZ4BX". Really rolls off the tongue, that one.

It's actually slightly easier, bZ4X.

The name does actually have a meaning: bZ(Beyond Zero emissions) 4 (based on Rav4) X (Crossover)

That said, I wish they had just called it the Rav4 Electric. I believe mass adoption comes from car companies integrating the electric models into what (non-cutting edge) consumers already trust (Chevy is the only one really embracing this idea)

Considering this model was announced before they asked Toyoda to step down for failing in EV adoption, I suspect it was named to not sully the reputation of an established model.

> Rav4 Electric

REV4.

  - it's a Rav4
  - it's an EV
  - it revs
  - it's a revolution

> That said, I wish they had just called it the Rav4 Electric. I believe mass adoption comes from car companies integrating the electric models into what (non-cutting edge) consumers already trust (Chevy is the only one really embracing this idea)

There are some more. Peugeot has electric models with the same naming as their ICE models but an "e" on front (e-208, e-2008, etc.) Hyundai has the Ioniq in EV and non-EV versions. And there was also a Volkswagen eGolf, although I think that one has been abandoned to be replaced by models with electric-specific naming.

It's actually BZ4x. Beezey Forks.

Toyota press people don't like people calling it the Beezey Forks. But much like the XBone, once you hear the name, it sticks.

I would pronounce that “busybox.” I wonder if it uses BusyBox.

The sister Subaru Solterra is slightly better, but not much.

Certainly at least the Skoda Enyaq offers a heads up display. I suspect that means that all the VW group cars do.

It was an option on the VW ID.3 I bought, so yes, all VAG EVs presumably.