Yes, every single prius for example? The biggest engine that was produced with seems to be a ~100 bhp engine which isn't much for a 1.5 metric tonne car

In most countries, yes. Despite the push for SUV-styled cards (which are heavier than a regular city car, but not by that much), engines have been small.

Toyota Yaris - HSD - 1.5L 4cyl Renault Clio - E-Tech - 1.6L Hyundai Kona (SUV) - 1.6L Honda Jazz - 1.5L Peugeot 208 - 1.2L Peugeot 3008 (SUV) - 1.6L Peugeot 5008 (Family SUV) - 2L And the list goes on. Even BMW with it's xDrive puts out 1.5L engines.

Huge engines are only common in two places: sports cars (and even then, only a specific category like AMGs and friends, because even a Porsche 992 only has a 3L engine) and the US.

Fiat 500 hybrid 999cc engine, 69bhp (51kW).

I hired one on holiday and it worked fine. Maybe I'm getting old but I see less point in getting something that does 0-60 in 4 sec when most traffic goes from 0-40 in about two minutes and doesn't get much faster. It still has a top speed over 100mph.

The vast majority of hybrids use simulated atkinson cycle... while their cylinders might be the same size as N/A vehicles, they leave the intake valve open past the end of the stroke, so they effectively are displacing less, even though the cylinder dimensions might be the same size. The advantage is that atkinson cycle is more efficient. But it has too poor performance characteristics for an ICE-only car.

Omoda 9 (SUV) is sold in Europe only as plug-in hybrid with small-ish 1.5L 143HP engine + 394HP electric (145km of pure electric range, 35kWh LFP battery).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exeed_Yaoguang

>On paper, yes, but did that ever happen?

Like absolutely, unless you consider 1.4L petrol engine large for something with over 170KW (over 220hp). Such kind of offerings are quite common at the East side of the pond.

Yes, check out BYD's hybrids. The petrol engine is 46% efficient, which is pretty damn amazing. This is more efficient than most power plants (combined cycle plants are better- but most power plants are not combined-cycle).

So what is the well to wheel efficiency of this vs. pure electric? There are fuel transportation losses in one, and transmission line losses in the other. In many cities electricity is quite a bit more expensive than gas so hybrids are a better deal financially.

> did that ever happen?

In 2010 with the Chevrolet Volt.

I wonder whether people actually understand that they need a smaller engine for the same performance?

I've never seen a car where the hybrid and pure gas versions have the same size engine; the hybrid engine is almost always lighter and makes less power.

BMW i8

I thought about PHEV but in the end went full EV simply because it seemed to me with two whole power trains that's 2x the components to go wrong/need maintenance.

Smaller cars have always been available, but people have shown a preference for bigger cars where they can sit higher up, even though it costs them more.

The post you commented on was talking about Toyota hybrids though, who don't use a CVT in the sense you're talking about.

They use a series-parallel hybrid transmission which is sometimes called eCVT, but works completely different from a classic CVT. There are no pullies, belts, chains, none of that. What they do have is a couple of motor-generators and a differential to link the system up with the engine and the drive shaft. No friction losses like CTVs have.

See https://prius.ecrostech.com/original/PriusFrames.htm, or look up "Hybrid Synergy Drive" on Wikipedia or Youtube or your favorite search engine.

I have a Subaru (ten years old w/ >200k miles on it's chain-type CVT), and I thought the justification for it was that it was more efficient than previous systems.

From a mechanical engineering standpoint, the Subaru CVT uses a fairly conventional lock-up torque converter at the input, but that gets locked as you pass something like 15-20 mph (once the lowest gear ratio is satisfactory w/o the torque converter function) and beyond that all shifting of the CVT is done w/ the torque converter locked. In addition, the clamping force of the sheaves is adjusted per the torque load of the transmission to minimize the frictional losses.

Anyway I'm curious about data comparing efficiency of conventional and CVT automatics.

Depends on the configuration. If they are equipped with a CVT+electric engine on the shaft, then that's the case: they rev to the sweet spot (which on gas engines is 4000-5000 rpm on acceleration? Depending on expected engine load I assume) and the speed is controlled by hydraulic force applied on the CVT.

With other hybrids: depends on the generator they have installed, but it matches the consumption in amps by the engine in order to "go" if it is not directly coupled with the transmission, or they just downshift to accelerate with help of the electric engine.

I am assuming a lot here: Toyotas (specially RAV4) mount CVTs among others, assuming pure electric generator by the ICE or coupled to it... So it depends a lot on specific configuration.

I know for a fact you can neutral-drop a prius.

I know it's not exactly the same, but I was a teenager and curious, and you can rev them and shift into drive with some heel-toe finesse. Not sure if this works on the newer ones, this one was an early 2010s model.

Dunno. My both Priuses did it and the company was specifically using the Yaris Hybrid.

Both will rev on neutral, but when the gear selector is on Drive there is no link between the pedal and RPM.

They're programmed to rev in situations like that, because people are used to it. Under normal operation, RPM is decided by power needs. If you start accelerating on the freeway, for example, the engine might jump from 1100 RPM to 3000 RPM with just some pedal, while a manual transmission obviously changes very little.

it's possible that the engine rev is just the speakers. a lot of cars are doing fake engine sounds.

Huh, that's interesting. Apparently China will be banning cars from having one-pedal driving as the default.

Losing muscle memory of pressing the brake pedal. Makes sense, actually.

I'm curious what you mean? I'm fairly confident the post you are responding to was only talking about newer transmissions. Which, I can't imagine those are going away?

So you just type in the speed you want and hit enter?

> The EU2200i can sustain 15 amps.

proverbial

Posted something very similar above. It’s worse than 2200 watts: that’s the allowable overload draw, not sustained. After about 5 minutes, it warns you to reduce power to <= 1800 watts.

Also, something I didn’t mention in my post; at full power they’ll suck their tank dry in a little over 3 hours. You’ll get about 20 miles of range (using your assumptions above) from one. Tbf you can also parallel two of them, or buy a slightly larger model (EU3200i), but either way, it’s still not going to be anything other than an emergency backup where you have a lot of time to kill.

I've ridden in one and this was basically a case of "you get the worst of both worlds". The engine was small and running at a constant RPM, leading to an annoying noise in the cabin. The range extension was not particularly huge. Worse, when we did eventually run out of battery on one trip, the range extender was unable to recharge the battery after refueling the car, forcing us to scramble to find an available charging station with the car on the tow truck...

> An engine, fuel system and a generator are all relatively complex additions […]

And yet that's what an ICE car is.

So a range extender (RX) should be no worse than ICE: in fact a little less complex because you don't have a gear train and transmission.

This does not make any sense. It's a cab, it's going to stay 100% of the time in a city or really near, moving around. If it ignites a petrol engine to recharge the battery, what's the point? Surely a cab driver can pause 20 minutes every 4 hours to go to the restroom and fast charge their EV, no?

They are the cheapest hybrid out there currently, at least here in the USA. I think the average American prefers a larger vehicle.

I think a Diesel indirect injection REX would be awesome. It could burn vegetable oil, which is more viscous, but indirect injection doesn't need to atomize the fuel as much.

I'd say more that it evolves rather than goes away. We've had our BEV for over a decade and it's the car we tend to choose to drive for short distance errands. We like it by all means, but when one of us needs to take the hybrid car for a weekend or a local business trip, we still have to plan out to make sure the other can manage whatever we need to do with just the BEV.

As dboreham says in the sibling comment, the range anxiety morphs into charger-availability anxiety. Even if I know a charger physically exists at my destination, if it's 45% or more of the range away, I still need to worry that it will be working, that my access will work, that it won't be occupied or blocked, etc.

In nearly 40 years of driving, I almost never researched gasoline availability (through the Nevada desert and in Central America, I did).

In a little over a decade of BEV driving, I've done a lot of EVSE (charger) researching.

It isn't really "range" anxiety, rather "no charger available" anxiety.

Today, if I run out of petrol|gasoline somewhere, even if I'm in the middle of nowhere and don't have a gas can, I can still recover from that situation within an hour or so (hitch a ride to the next gas station, buy gas can, fill with gas, hitch back to my vehicle). With an EV the density of fueling/charging locations is orders of magnitude lower than for gas, and if I end up discharged I'm looking at finding a flat bed truck, or perhaps a mobile high power generator.

Disclosure: I own both kinds of vehicles.

Eh, I'd say it goes away after your first road trip, unless you're going somewhere remote.

I've had my BEV for about 5 1/2 years. My first road trip (Portland -> Santa Clara, ~560 miles each way), I planned it out ahead of time with ABRP. These days, I'll just let the nav figure it out.

Perhaps, but other than the upcoming Scout, I’m not even sure it’s an option for EVs, in the US.

Not sure about the US, but the Japanese didn't stop focusing on hybrid development. More than half of all sales in Japan are hybrids, whereas electric is only a few percent [1].

Honda even recently announced that they're scaling back on electric to focus on hybrids:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/japans...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-19/hybrid-ca...

I think you meant capacitors. Resistors would just dissipate the energy as heat.

edit: Thanks for the correction. They do indeed use resistors and just dump the energy as heat. Unfortunate.

Hopefully this will change as supercaps continue to improve. Maxwell tech's modules are already used in light rail, and looks like some work towards smaller locomotives in Switzerland here:

https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/20823697

Diesel-electric engines in trains and tanks worked like that during WW2.

> ICEs have highest momentum and efficiency sweet spot somewhere in the middle of available revs

Close: they have the highest efficiency at about 90% of maximum torque for most of the RPM range. So if you want double the power, you want to be able to double the RPM; and if you want half the power, you want to be able to drop the RPMs in half. To pull this off, you either need a very quick shifting gearbox or some sort of CVT.

This is also why automatic transmissions, despite being ~80% efficient versus ~95% manual transmissions, are not much worse on mileage. Because they can quickly switch between low RPM and higher RPM (first by torque converter lockup, second by switching gears).

Hyundai/Kia use a traditional 6-speed auto in their hybrids. I drive one, the engine stays at a few RPM stepping points during most driving (it likes ~1600RPM, ~2200RPM, and ~3600RPM). I had a Prius previously, and I like this different setup because it reduces "engine droning noise", which was terrible on the Prius.

Though H/K have recently introduced a new hybrid system with a CVT, so maybe 2026 or 27 model years will be different.

Since I'm only making one comment, I also want to say hybrid cars are better than ICE because there are fewer belt-driven accessories. Aircon in particular on an electric motor is a big improvement. Without the idling engine producing heat, hybrids are much nicer in hot stop-and-go conditions!

Also my Prius made it its whole life (200k miles and ~20 years) without ever changing the brake pads... amazing!

I'd say that the market is very fragmented.

Toyota and Lexus, obviously, use eCVT in their cars.

Honda is also in eCVT camp for most of their models but for example new CR-V has weird setup. It acts as an BEV until ~80-100kmh and then shifts completely to ICE with a single gear. While in EV mode the engine is constantly charging batteries.

Then you have KIA and Hyundai with their dual clutch setup in all HEV and PHEV range.

Lots. BMW, Audi, Mercedes, Porsche, Volkswagen, Volvo for example.

I find it a pity that Lexus uses CVTs as I would probably sell my BMW 330e and get a Lexus.

Drum brakes are cheaper, too. The VW ID4 has rear drum brakes for all of these reasons and it seems to work out very well.

If you don't break hard enough, it might still be the recuperation doing its work.

Car producers can and do resolve this, e.g. iirc Audis don't use recuperation for the first breaking of the day. That way you don't have to remember to use the no-recuperation/break cleaning mode or break unnecessarily hard every now and then.

*braking

* https://www.dictionary.com/e/brake-vs-break/

The two words are:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophone

Modern EVs tend to do blended braking (at least by default) in which case pressing the brake pedal gently will likely just do more regen braking. It’s only when you request more than regen braking can provide that physical brakes engage.

Yup, my Golf GTE is mostly used to fetch groceries, but every now and again I'll blast down a faster road and brake harder than just regen to keep the brakes themselves in good condition. It's almost second-nature at this point.

Sure, gonna slam on brakes while in front of you.

It's 2025 and hybrids have enough software to automate some non-hybrid braking action.

There is a wide variety, MHEV is quite popular here due to lack of home charging, as many people live in terraces, etc

We have a selection of smaller popular hatchbacks with MHEV available (ie, the Hyundai i20) that I believe were not released in some markets

The leasing culture for "luxury" cars is quite prevalent here too, and many new cars from popular brands such as Land Rover are at minimum MHEV from new nowadays, in order to get fleet emissions down

This is something that's always baffled me about Teslas. I have a Prius, and regenerative breaking being tied to the break pedal is easy and intuitive. It also means I can easily lift my foot of the gas pedal to coast. IDK it just seems like a much better design to have one "stop" pedal and one "go" pedal, vs one "stop" pedal and one "go/stop" pedal.

They didn't spend skill points because back when they did it they wanted to lean hard into the "oooh, fancy futuristic EV, look at this cool new driving experience" brand image. Same reason performance cars get loud exhausts even thought they could have quit ones with no decrease in performance.

I'm not sure what you're arguing here.

Bigger battery is more capacity sure. But their point was that even without a big battery they have enough capacity to get close to maximum effectiveness, contrary to ajross saying that a hybrid's capacity is "not really" effective and "at best" helps "some".

The manual says it's energy recovered (ie, not something relative to system capacity), and this seems consistent with the other indicator that shows instantaneous braking power with a distinction between what the regenerative system is doing vs what (if anything) the traditional brakes are doing.

That's because the regenerative braking is applied on the brake pedal, not by lifting up the accelerator. My '14 Prius has a dashboard option to show how much of the regenerative breaking capacity is being used, and it's very easy to stay well below that limit by just gradually slowing down. The friction brakes are only really used when you suddenly stop, which is something you want to avoid anyway.

That's not OK by any means, you don't have mandatory periodical technical inspections? This would fail immediately in any half-decent country. An example - wife's older Seat has 6 years old winter tires which were given for free when buying it second hand a year ago. Technician just told us even those are beyond acceptable here in Switzerland and we need to change them before next inspection.

Your very old tires makes you a serious threat on the road while completely oblivious about this fact... not cool, please change them if you drive on public roads, if not for you just for the sake of others.

Rubber degrades with UV exposure, even if the tread depth is ok. Be careful, esp at higher speeds.

Beware of dry rot. Rubber that old is likely not in as good shape as it might appear, and could fail catastrophically in the right conditions.

Seriously, you should not use tires older than 10 years. They degrade over time.

Yup. For example on a round trip today in me EV (2025 Hyundai Kona) on the out here are the stats:

     2 kWh for the drivetrain
   809  Wh regenerated

     2 kWh for the drivetrain
   547  Wh regenerated

I'm mostly happy about that but there is one thing that annoys me. 33% is close to how much a kilometer is shorter than a mile (38%).

Why the fuck would I care that these two numbers are that close? It is because of a mystery in the Hyundai app. When you look up the trip details for an EV trip it gives you mileage, duration, and energy use (drivetrain, climate, accessories) and regeneration.

The mileage is substantially less than what the car shows. For example for the aforementioned trip home that trip odometer shows 8.0 miles but the Hyundai app shows 5 miles. The car odometer has the correct distance.

There are two theories to explain this.

1. The app is showing how many miles worth of energy you used rather than your actual trip mileage. All the other data it shows (except for the duration) is energy related. For my 8.0 mile trip I got 3 miles worth of the energy the drivetrain used back via regeneration, so I only actually paid for 5 miles worth of electricity.

Based on the Wh given it should actually be 5.4 miles, but the app only displays integer mileage so 5 it is.

2. It's a botched unit conversion. E.g., the car uploads the data in miles but the expects the data to be in km, so it is doing a conversion. That would turn the 8.0 into 5.0, which would be 5 in the app and so matches what theory #1 predicts.

I've checked several of my trips and they have always happened to have the right amount of regeneration so that the two theories match due to the app only showing an integer mileage.

I did a test today to try to tell them apart. I changed the car's settings to km and took a trip. The idea was if the car had been uploading in miles that would hopefully change it to upload in km, matching the app's expectation, and so the miles shown in the app would match the actual miles of the trip if theory #2 was correct, and show the regeneration corrected miles if theory #1 was correct.

The result was that the app still showed miles consistent with theory #1. So mystery solved, right?

Maybe not. When the car was set to miles everything showed in miles. Speedometer, odometers, efficiency (mi/kWh), speed limits it read from traffic signs, and speed limits it gets from the map data when using navigation on highways.

I expected than when I switched it to km all of those would be in km, and I would not see miles anywhere. Also, I expected that when it saw a speed limit sign that said say 60 it would interpret that as 60 km/hr.

What actually happened is that miles mostly did go away, except on the speedometer it added a smaller mi/hr display under the km/hr display. For the traffic signs it still knew they were in mi/hr and it converted them, so when I got on the freeway as soon as I passed the sign that said 60 the speed limit sign shown on the instrument cluster said 97, and the red dot on the speedometer showing the current limit was placed in the right place.

That suggests that the car knows it is in a country that uses miles, and doesn't just go by whatever the units setting in the setup screen is set to. It could be that in miles countries the car also uploads in miles all the time, and so switching the units setting to km would not change the results if theory #2 was true.

Now my plan is to find a big parking lot that is mostly empty overnight, such at a Walmart or Home Depot or a mall, go there and turn the car off and then back on which starts a new trip, set regeneration to 0 which turns off automatic regeneration on the accelerator so the car only regenerates when you use the brake pedal, and then drive around the parking lot for about 10 miles without using the brakes, then coast to a stop and turn the car off the end the trip.

Then I'll turn it back on, drive home, and check the trip details in the app. If theory #1 is right then the miles in the app should match the odometer miles. If theory #2 is correct the app miles should still be 38% shorter than the odometer miles.

> And how often did you engine break with that ICE car when driving around the city?

Oh all the time. I used to drive like a typical youth. I've been in USA for 10 years now and still hate driving automatics because they shift into too high a gear and then you have to constantly use the brakes. It's annoying.

> The EV slows down much more quickly when slowing down, to the point where it's a good replacement for the brake

Are you comparing to an automatic ICE or a manual?

In my experience of driving EVs their engine braking is sub-par to what I'm used to at least from my motorcycle. Bikes have silly high compression compared to their weight. You def have to be careful about chopping the throttle.

Tesla is a quite common EV brand. They do not allow configuring regen braking, except for the behaviour at stand-still.

(They also don't do blending between friction brakes and regen, so the cars behaviour when letting of the accelerator is highly inconsistent depending on temperature and charge level).

One of the reasons I long for the lease on my Model Y to end so I can replace it with a less stupid vehicle.

Except it's not a real point of difference. Just because some cars are programmed to act that way doesn't mean we should treat it like a universal constant of EVs. EVs can be programmed to only engage regenerative braking when the brake pedal is pressed, no riding the gas pedal needed.

Many electric cars are also overpowered. For those with a more reasonable ~100kw, gentleness hardly matters.

As another data point, I've owned PHEVs and EVs for gosh 6 years now and I still prefer the "weak" regen with the Chevy paddle brake to modulate. Sometimes when I have a clear path, e.g. a down hill on a highway, I just throw it in neutral for a pure coast and shift back into drive when I need to.

It will disable itself if your battery is already full...

Some cars it's quite an abrupt change from the regen braking to the hydraulic brakes.

And that downshifting involves a clutch operation, moving the engine into a higher RPM. That most certainly wears down the clutch, talking as someone who's replaced quite a few of them.

Actually you'll get some engine braking by just letting off the gas and stepping on the break. Fuel will get cut off in these cases in most cars (unless you're running a very old carburetor car)

Exactly, if your clutch suffers abuse when you are shifting gears (unless you're trying to aggressively accelerate of course) you need to rethink what you're doing.

Not saying it's smart but when predictably decelerating on the highway I sometimes shift gears by rev matching and changing without even touching the clutch, for the fun of it.

I don't know about today's engines, but some early fuel injected engines would actually use more fuel when engine braking. In those early designs spark could not be cut off, so if this extra fuel were not added then the mixture would run very hot and risk pre-ignition and damage. I don't know about carbureted vehicles.

If it takes energy to compress the air in the cylinder - doesn't it also release most of that energy when that compressed air is expanded on the subsequent stroke?

If you release the compressed air without pushing the cylinder down you would lose that energy, but you would need a extra device to do so (by lifting a valve at the right time). This option does exist for large vehicles like trucks as a compression release engine brake [0], but this isn't something you'd have on a family car.

In a petrol engine you always want the same ratio of petrol to air in the mix that is taken into a cylinder. As you want to vary the amount of fuel, and therefore power developed, you have to be able to therefore limit the amount of air that is sucked in. Otherwise the engine would always run at full power.

There is a mechanical restrictor called a throttle plate that lives inside the throttle body that restricts how much air the cylinder can pull in (and therefore how much fuel is injected to get the same fuel/air mix). This is controlled by the throttle. When you are coasting, this plate is in its most closed position. This creates significant resistance on the intake stroke, and is where the majority of energy is lost during engine braking. This is also known as a pumping loss.

Diesels always intake the same amount of air, so they can compress it enough to autoignite the fuel. They vary the amount of fuel injected to the same volume of air. This means no throttle body or plate, so unless an extra exhaust restrictor has been added there is minimal engine braking on a diesel engine.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_release_engine_bra...

Auto trans downshift is designed for long hills, not downshifting frequently to stop signs etc like you'd do with a stick.

Even with paddles, there's a delay, or it briefly goes neutral, or it doesn't rev-match well. Or you can't double/triple-downshift, which is worse when you have 8-12 gears. Allegedly wears them down faster too, which idk but would not be surprised if it were true given how unhappy it feels.

An aside on your last point: In the D gear, a lot of auto transmissions will be set up to allow for the wheels to spin somewhat independently of the engine (in any gear) when you aren't accelerating, which accounts a lot for how well an automatic will coast when you release the throttle, even if you're not going fast enough for top gear (especially apparent with older four speed boxes).

Using the numbered gear options will enable clutches/bands that provide more engine braking.

It depends on the implementation. I ride an automatic motorbike which will downshift if I grab the brakes a bit harder, even if I'm only slowing to a speed to which it wouldn't otherwise shift.

For example, if I brake somewhat hard from 130 km/h to 90, it will downshift from 6th to 5th. When riding normally, it would stay in 6th down to around 50.

Many modern automatics are smart enough to do this for you if you tap the brakes while rolling downhill.

Related to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_release_engine_bra...

I'v bee downshifting manually with automatic especially when riding downhill. The effect with Chrysler T&C 2009 was very noticable and effective.

Toyota Sienna 2015 - the braking effect is unfortunately minor.