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Which is something that can be fixed by simply making smaller vehicles
What do you mean? I need my 5 ton off-road monster truck to get the kids to school and pick up some groceries!
Yeah, but you also do that one camping trip where you have to drive on a gravel road for like 400 meters (over 1000 foot, can you imagine!?) once every 3 years, so that makes it totally ok buy a literal tank on wheels.
People wildly underestimate how good modern cars car be. While driving across country in my gfs accord we ended up on a gravel mountain road for several miles. It was so much damn fun, but she was anxious the whole time saying how it wasn't designed for it.
It was a wide, maintained road. We could easily go 35 to 40 mph. It would have for 4 or 5 cars side by side and the whole time we were on it we saw only like 6.
Cars not designed for roads geez. Tell her all it matters is rock chips.
"But isn't that, like, communism?"
Blasphemy
Plug-in hybrids are ideal. They get the cleanliness and efficiency of regen breaking, the efficiency of an electric motor, with the much smaller footprint of a battery 15% the weight of an ev battery. They effectively suppress range anxiety while still heavily incentivizing electricity use instead of gasoline. And when they do run on gasoline in exceptional circumstances, they are running more efficiently than conventional gas cars.
Except the circumstances in which they run on gasoline are not that exceptional: https://theicct.org/publication/real-world-phev-use-jun22/ And the lower weight of the battery is partially offset by needing an additional drive train, a transmission with multiple gears (purely electric cars usually have fixed transmission) and other smaller parts required for the combustion engine. These also increase the required maintenance a lot (e.g. requiring oil changes).
It just fully depends on the driver. A PHEV which the driver does not recharge is just a heavier HEV.
But if you have less than 70km to drive every day and have a home charger, there's barely ever any reason to use gas.
The issue is that many PHEV owners only get one because it allows them to get around regulations for driving in city centers, so they just use the cars as gasoline powered cars.
Here in Germany you get a used PHEV (2 years old) with unused and wrapped charging cable. They were never charged and never drove electric. Why? Because our politicians thought exactly like you that PHEVs are awesome, so they allowed financial benefits for them. They are not awesome. You have two power trains, are carrying an unused gasoline engine when driving electric and an unused battery pack when driving with gasoline. You do need oil changes (which you don't need with BEVs) and other parts of the engine need replacement. And to top it off, PHEVs are mostly huge cars. In my opinion, PHEVs combine the worst parts of both technologies.
A lot of these arguments are not logical.
Yes you can have large PHEVs, but the trend for bigger stupider cars is independent of power source. You can get a PHEV Renault Clio and it's 20% lighter than the smaller electric Renault 5. And uses 80% less precious minerals because you have a smaller battery.
The gas engine needs maintenance of course, but you do use it much less than the electric motor, requiring much less maintenance than a normal car.
The fact that people buy PHEVs for the tax incentives and use them as gas vehicles is stupid and annoying, but that's not a fault in the technology itself.