What? Of course not. I don’t need a car for my commute. I need it to go places, and some of those places are more than 400 km away. France, for example.
Then a plugin hybrid is not a reasonable choice for you. The use case for this car is for daily commutes. You would either rent a different car for long trips or have an alternative car in the family.
That was my point - being made in a somewhat snarky way due to low blood sugar. Plugin electric cars are for short commuting and errands around town, with the current technology there is no reasonable way to expect them to replace oil-burning vehicles for long distances.
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I’d suggest a small turbine engine, running at fixed rpm and fixed load in the optimum efficiency point, recharging the battery continuously if needed. Or, a different kind of motor (Stirling, perhaps?) capable of running on multiple fuels, so you can recharge the car with anything from gasoline to vegetable oil to pine cones.
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That sounds like an excellent idea - you should get to work on it.
I’ve often throught about that. Could a fuel burning engine be so efficient if it was only required to run at a fixed rpm, that this could overcome the losses of mechanical-elctric-mechanical conversion. Of course, re-gen braking would help, but you get that with a conventional hybrid anyway. The i3 with the range-extender option is a current example (I think).
One issue with economy figures is that the manufacturers know the tests and “game” them with very specific tuning. The move to samller turbo engines is an example of this. They test just great in terms of l/100km but the real world shows them to be much thirstier.
(This is similar to why high-end sports cars are so loud. They pass the emissions tests with specific acoustic tuning (and even valves in the exhaust system) but as soon as you move the revs much above the test range, all hell breaks loose. And it is sweet!)
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Yes and no.
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They are now. I want them to become more than that. A car that’s only for short commutes is unreasonable for us. We tend to go on vacation by car, and my wife occasionally has to drive all over the country for her work. The former might be solvable by renting a car (maybe even renting it at the target destination so we could travel there by train, which would be awesome), but the latter still makes a 300 km car still impractical.
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