A plug-in hybrid thread

In My Humble Opinion
1

One of my current cars is a 2013 C-Max Energi. It’s not a bad car but mostly I like it because I bought it off-lease for 35% of its original sticker price. It’s got a lot of tech in it and while it’s been mostly reliable, sometimes it does weird things that require a very hard reboot. The whole thing worries me, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop in terms of an expensive repair.

When I bought it my plan was to wait for more EVs to come out and replace it with one after 5 years. Well it’s been 6 years and while more EVs have come out, I can’t rationalize spending $50k for any of the ones that catch my eye.

Well I just learned that the Prius still exists, and the plug-in version actually seems pretty compelling. It’s a sharp looking car with 220hp and 38 miles of EV range (the C-Max has like 17). Price hasn’t been announced but it’ll likely start in the low 30s.

Is a plug-in hybrid dead end tech or is it still a reasonable stop-gap until the affordable EV becomes a reality?

2

I’m a plug-in hybrid guy. I don’t want the costs and inconvenience of licensing and paying taxes on two cars, or renting an ICE if I want to drive cross country. And ecologically a plug-in can let you use electric for 90% of your driving, while only needing 20% as much lithium to manufacture.

The Prius Prime has been extremely reliable, the C-Max very reliable, and Chevy Volt above average (i think). I bought a used 2017 C-Max because it had substantially more room for dogs and camping than the other two common 2nd hand plug-ins. Also the 4th Gen Prius design was not attractive — unlike the upcoming 2023 which is darn sharp.

I’m very happy with my C-Max Energi, except that the winter electric range can be just 10 miles — which is just too low. I’ve seen charts saying that cars using heat pumps retain much more electric range in cold weather.

3

I would like to get a Toyota RAV4 Prime but my understanding is that it’s a popular car, so getting one might require paying above MSRP. And from what I can see, it will cost $40-50,000.

4

My wife had a Prime, and I had a Volt. I would say the Prime is head and shoulders better. It’s a really nice car. We only got rid of it when we went totally EV.

5

A couple of years ago I got a 2019 KIA Niro PHEV with the “pemium” trim line (still much cheaper than a bare-bones Tesla), and it’s been a great car. It is definitely an advantage to not have to find a working charge station on a long trip, and I have solar panels on my house so short trips are nearly free.The 2023 models have a greater (33 mi) range and a higher price tag: New 2023 Kia Niro Plug-in Hybrid Reviews, Pricing & Specs | Kelley Blue Book.

6

I liked the look of the original Volt, and was sorry when Chevy normalized, but the photos I’ve seen of the dash controls were scary: 16 identical nub-sized buttons with gray on white labels.
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And to the OP: Three members of my family have a C-Max. My brother got a new one in 2013 because it had SUV storage without the shitty mileage or the glowering macho styling. I got my used Titanium Energi in 2020 because I wanted a plug-in with room and good features. Then my daughter’s SO was shopping for used CRVs and Rav4s during the pandemic, and those models were rare and sky high; his car broke down, I loaned him my C-Max, and a month later he bought a 2016 (hybrid).

7

Add me to the 2013 CMax Energi crowd, bought new. It’s been … okay. Our current other car is a Nissan Leaf Plus. Chose the CMax Energi over the Volt for the three seats in the rear.

As noted, not huge battery only range, which goes way down in winter, especially with heat on. The “engine maintenance” cycle, running the engine for a while no matter that the battery is full, is annoying. Also it is clearly a car that was not purpose designed to be a PHEV: the battery sticking up in the area behind the rear seats both makes for little storage and, more importantly, puts disproportionate weight in the back, resulting in less weight over the front wheels that drive the car. Short version, crappy to drive in slippery winter conditions.

It’s still fine for my purposes: most days a short commute and occasional drives to NJ or Vermont from Chicago to visit MIL or daughter in college.

The new Prius Prime does sound nice.

My 2013 CMax Energi will do fine for me for now and likely for a good while longer, but when it is time I’ll have to evaluate how often I will be wanting to drive long distances and what the charging network looks like at that point. Along with the then available options are and what my budget is at the time.

8

Just yesterday I was reading an article that Consumer Reports released their most and least reliable 2023 vehicles.

(I know. Consumer Reports, yadda yadda yadda. And 2023 vehicles haven’t had a lot of time to gather data. So take this all with a grain of salt.)

Their rankings have full EVs at the bottom of the reliability list while the hybrids are at the top. The main complaints for the full EVs seem to be “owners reporting charging problems, battery problems and electric drive motor issues.”

Otherwise, I have no point to this post other than I thought you all might like the article and may trigger some interesting discussion.

9

Oh my God, i used to have a c-max energi, and I’ve never talked to another person who had one!

Mine was a lemon. I loved lots of things about it, but it just had too many problems.

We had to have the connection between the big battery and… something else redone. My 110 pound daughter broke off the interior door handle. (They eventually recalled that.) Sometimes we couldn’t turn off the radio or change stations. Once, it refused to go into reverse. Several times it refused to start. It just had something wrong with it far too often.

I loved the way it drove. It was so responsive. Mine was okay in snow. Not super, but better than the civic it replaced. Despite the miniscule winter range, we put half our miles on the battery over the years we had that car.

10

My wife has a C-Max Energi Titanium plug in but hers is a 2017. It was previously a corporate fleet vehicle. She bought it when she was still working and commuting but she’s been retired for a few years now and almost all of her driving now is around town, so she uses very little gas. It sounds like they must have got some bugs worked out since the 2013 model because she hasn’t had any of the issues mentioned above. My only complaints with it are the battery range* and the interior feels a little cheaply made in some places.

* Once on a nice day when I didn’t need heat or AC I took it out to see how many miles I could get on a full charge, and I think I was able to squeeze out a little over 20 before the engine kicked in.

11

For such a pricy car, yes, but other than the door handles, everything seemed to work fine, at least with regards to the interior.

A lot of the problems were software, and the car improved substantially after a big software upgrade. (And after reattaching the big battery. That had been the cause of most of the “doesn’t move” incidents.

There was the funny time that it randomly died on a suburban back road somewhere. It was still under “bumper to bumper” service, so a Ford technician came out to give us a jump start or something. And he said, “can you open the rear door”. “No”, i replied. “I need the rear door open to get at the battery”. “Yes, but i can’t open the rear door without power, and the car has no power. So no, i can’t open the rear door for you.”

He managed to get at what he needed, somehow. But honestly that was a stupid design decision.

Anyway, the other reason we traded it in was that we got rid of our van, and the c-max didn’t have enough cargo space for a long trip. We debated getting another hybrid electric, but at the time, they all had worse cargo than the c-max. Yes, we could have rented a car for the two trips annually where we would have needed that. But i thought about how stressful it is to prepare for those trips, trying to fit everything in around work, and decided that the extra time and stress of also dealing with a rental would be really unpleasant. So we got a Subaru Forester. I miss a lot of the bells and whistles of the c-max. (It had awesome automatic windshield wipers, for instance.) And we’ve upgraded the power in the house, so we can now get (and charge) a fully electric car for our next vehicle.

Anyway, to answer the op, i think plugin hybrids will be a useful option for another decade, at least, and if there’s one you like, i wouldn’t avoid it for being “dead end technology”. Our next car will be fully electric because we have two cars, and can use the Subaru for road trips. But if we had one car, I’d still be looking for plugin hybrids.

12

I have to ask: What’s the point of a plug-in hybrid? You can get almost 40 miles before the engine kicks in? That doesn’t seem ‘worth it’ when your commute is 250 miles. It seems more convenient to buy an extra gallon of gas than to mess with an extension cord - especially if it’s raining or snowing and you have to take the cord inside.

13

Very few people have a commute of 250 miles. I believe the average person drives only about thirty miles or less on a typical day, so the short EV-only range is sufficient.

14

Did the op say they have a crazy long commute like that?

My typical commute is 4 miles to the train station, and then the commuter rail. Even in the winter, with only 10 miles in my battery, i could drive to the train and pick up some groceries on my way home without the engine going on.

I think i mentioned, when we sold the car i was able to calculate how many miles we’d gone on battery and how many on gas, and it was about 50/50.

And the thing i really miss most about that car is that i never had to keep an eye on the gas, except on road trips. There was zero chance that I’d get into the car and run out of gas, because it started every morning with more than enough charge to get me to a gas station. (and yes, driving an ICE, i did once run out of gas.) I never thought it was a burden to always help track of the gas until i went a couple of years without doing it. It took more than a year of driving the ICE until it stopped feeling like a burden again.

Also, i have a garage. The charger lived in the garage, next to the car. It was just a cord with a big lump on it, not an installed thing. But i put a hook next to the outlet, left it always plugged in, and plugging in the car when i got home was about as much effort at closing the driver’s door, which is to say, totally inconsequential. Unplugging it and hanging it on the hook was similarly about as much effort as opening the door. Less effort than opening a locked door.

Plugin hybrids aren’t for everyone. I don’t think we have anything like the infrastructure to drive any flavor of EV without a handy home charger. But they are a great option for a lot of people.

15

When my wife was working/commuting, she had about a 30 mile drive to work. The battery would get her about halfway there (and halfway back, since she could recharge at work). But now, her typical day of running around town is probably 15 miles or less, so it’s perfect for her usage.

16

I know the car keeps track but I haven’t checked lately, we’ve put about 60k miles on it over the last 6 years (we don’t drive much) and about 30% of that has been EV only. It lives in the garage charging so the first 17 miles of every day are gas-free. (I live in coal country so I have no illusions about the emissions improvements, but electricity per mile is cheaper than gas at the moment). Obviously most of the miles are from longer trips where we run out of juice.

Is it worth it? Depends on how much you pay extra. I think Ford was asking too much for the Energi – I “discovered” the C-Max after googling “models with the biggest incentives” late in December. It’s a frumpy looking car with a giant battery taking up all of the trunk space; nobody wanted them. Off-lease models were similarly discounted, so I essentially got the plug-in “perk” for free over a standard model.

17 miles (best case range) isn’t worth a whole lot. 40 miles would cover a lot more of our usage, and we’d pretty much only use gas if we left the city. I’d have to run the numbers to see what the break-even point is, say, between a regular Prius and the Prime. But they haven’t released pricing for the 2023 Prime. There’s a chance it’s going to be considerable bump in price over the outgoing Prime because the powertrain is so much better.

17

Yes, I’ve been there. The 12V battery is buried in the trunk and you have to take a bunch of stuff out to get to it, and even more to remove it. The first time it died I had to crawl in through the back seat because I couldn’t get the trunk to open even with a jump pack on the terminals under the hood. When that battery dies the whole car is lifeless.

Prior to replacing the battery (e.g. when it was on its last legs) the car did all kinds of weird stuff that I’d never experienced before. Individual electrical systems would stop working periodically. Radio, backup camera, turn signals. It all seemed so random. Replacing the battery fixed it all but it was sketchy.

After I replaced the battery, the car will just periodically not turn on. The 12V battery will be at 100% but it’s as if it’s not even there. I put a jump pack on the terminals under the hood and the car turns on just fine. Then it will be fine for weeks or months. It just did it again yesterday in fact.

All of this concerns me. I’m over 100k miles and honestly it’s been fairly reliable but any more that goes wrong with that electrical system and I’m not sure what the bill will be to fix it. Not to mention the CVT and all of the other tech in the drivetrain. In a car that’s worth maybe 9 grand right now… I’m not sure I’d have the stomach to throw money at fixing any of these big ticket items.

18

No reason it can’t be both. Battery (or supercapacitor) tech will eventually reach the point where it never makes any sense to have a gas tank on a car, so in that sense, it’s a dead end. But it hasn’t reached that point yet, so it still makes sense to have cars with gas tanks.

Pure gasoline cars, meanwhile, are a dead-end technology that really doesn’t have any excuse any more. Anything a pure-gasoline car can do, a plug-in hybrid can, too. I can’t understand why any car company has made any pure-gasoline cars in the last five years.

If you’re going 250 miles, I don’t know what that is, but it ain’t a “commute”. Even if that’s all on 70 MPH roads, that’s three and a half hours. Assume 8 hours each of work and sleep, that leaves an hour total for all meals, all breaks, getting dressed, and so on.

And even if you do have an extraordinarily long commute of 60 miles or so, that still leaves two-thirds of your commute on battery power. Cutting your gas usage by a factor of three sounds plenty significant, to me.

19

I’m convinced they didn’t redo the traction control calibration for the Energi either. The front wheels never have traction in slippery conditions and the electric motor is constantly sending torque spikes at them regardless.

20

Well, that’s the round-trip; and it’s only once a week. :wink:

It took 3:25 to get home Tuesday. It was raining, and Washingtonians don’t know how to drive in the rain – plus Washington drivers are pretty bad anyway.