So no cross hybrid, but both cars spend quite a bit of time sitting around. They both get taken out for a drive a couple of times a week, mostly errands and appointments in town. Sometimes a road trip of 1000 miles in the Prius--it does well.

No problems with either.

(In fact, 14 years after buying it, we just had our first "substantial" repair recently for the Prius. Maybe $500?)

I find that the Reddit pages on particular cars are extremely informative.

I'll use mine more than you do, but it's great to know you haven't had problems despite using low mileage.

for batteries and electric motors etc that one all-electric vehicle uses.

So one can build several/many hybrids with the same amount of lithium and rare earth's or whatever as one EV.

And which fleet reduces emissions more: X hybrids, or 1 EV plus X-1 internal combustions? The answer I've been told is the hybrids.

I've seen an infographic about this specific to Toyota but I don't want to misquote the numbers which I cannot properly recall. Now maybe that's Toyota marketing propaganda, I dunno. But it seems like something worth considering, or trying to look into if it would assuage your concerns.

I went in with the belief that I wanted a plug-in EV.
I was talked out of it and I'm glad that I was. We are very low mileage drivers and I love the car. You actually get better mileage in town. This car was leased new to an employee. At the end of the lease she got another one, same color, only newer. They gave us great warranties. We couldn't be happier.

It only has 49,000 and had no major problems. We only replaced the tires and the 12 volt battery.

We ❤️ it! We will replace it next year to upgrade the technology.

It is my understanding that it is more important to keep the battery between 20 and 80 % charged than how long it sits between charging. Also it's important that it not get to 0% or, depending on the safety levels in Toyota's battery management system, the battery may go dead completely. Having a car built by the most reliable vehicle manufacturer in the world is great piece of mind. The high voltage battery in that car is either a 0.9 kWh lithium-ion battery, which is ~1 / 70th the raw materials and about 1/4 the weight (speaking of efficiency) of a full size all electric or a nickel- metal - hydride battery.

Looks like a great car for the buyer and for the planet. Plus you'll never have to wait in a line to wait to charge. And during a power outage you'll be mobile - as long as you can get some gas.

I Can’t Believe The $30k Toyota Corolla Cross Hybrid Is This Good
https://www.theautopian.com/i-cant-believe-the-30k-toyota-corolla-cross-hybrid-is-this-good/

Battery University.com - way more than you'll want to read but site/page search will answer most questions.
https://batteryuniversity.com/

Toyota 1-6-90 Rule - Hybrids are an excellent bridge to a cleaner future.

Jalopnik May 17, 2023 : This Is Why Toyota Isn't Rushing to Sell You an Electric Vehicle
A corporate document reveals why Toyota will focus more on hybrids over EVs.

Do you suppose the display tells you the charge level of the electric/hybrid battery?

we bought a 2014 Ford C-Max Energi. It takes 5 hours to fully charge to 17 mph. We live in the country and have lots of hills, so braking recharges as we drive.

I love it. It's snappy and easy to drive. It's smart and starts the wipers by itself when it starts raining with lots of bells and whistles and is voice controlled.

I like it better than gas hybrid. Good luck in your search.

The paper from the primary scientific literature that I discussed in this post, A paper addressing the idea that electric cars are "green" reviews conveniently, the climate impact of cars on the grid on which I live, the PJM grid in the mid-Atlantic States.

It turns out that a hybrid car - no plug in - is slightly better on my grid than a plug in hybrid

From this graphic, on my grid, an electric car is actually worse than an internal combustion engine car - depending of course on gas mileage - because of the climate cost of making the batteries.

The climate intensity for the PJM grid was, in 2023, just under 400 grams CO₂/kWh, and is dominated by the use of dangerous natural gas, with some coal, and some clean nuclear energy.

Electricity Map PJM Grid

I drive a hybrid Toyota Camry, my second one, the first having been destroyed in a major accident. (All the major safety systems functioned perfectly and I suffered only minor injuries from the air bag and seat belt.)

I often work from home, but sometimes go to the lab. I do not notice many changes in the gas mileage if I don't drive for a few days. The car is rated at 51 mpg; I got the LE model for its slightly better mileage rating. It has radar adjusted cruise control. If I use this, and do not exceed the speed limit by very much, I routinely get better than 60 mpg. On very cold days in the winter however, the mileage will be less than 51 mpg unless I take a relatively long trip, whereupon the battery heats from charging and discharging. The car's dash reports the overall mileage and average speed which I reset on tank filling, and also the mileage on individual trips. It has graphics that tell you how you're doing.

Lithium batteries have a moral cost associated with cobalt slavery in Africa. The moral cost of my car is lower than with an electric car, but is certainly not devoid of moral cost.

I thus cannot be considered to be beyond reproach, but I may claim to be slightly less odious than I might be with, say, a Tesla.

Is that correct? And you haven't had problems with the battery?

...the New England States here and there, and have driven it on family vacations, the longest trip being from New Jersey to North Carolina.

It works out to about 15k miles per year on average.

I use my car far less.

All cars are dirty.

It doesn't make sense to me that the 5 kg of cobalt (Tesla Model 3) would have that much of an impact on life cycle air emissions?

From Google
The amount of cobalt in a Tesla battery varies by model and year, but Tesla has been reducing its cobalt use and aims to eliminate it completely:
Model S: The first Model S batteries contained about 11 kilograms of cobalt per vehicle.
Model 3: The Model 3 consumes about 4.5 kilograms of cobalt per vehicle.
Cobalt-free batteries: In April 2022, Tesla reported that about half of its new vehicles used cobalt-free iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries. Tesla's goal is to have cobalt-free batteries in all models.
Tesla has been reducing its cobalt use for years. The company has used a nickel-rich nickel-cobalt-aluminum cathode chemistry for cars outside of China, which has a low cobalt content of about 5%. Tesla has also eliminated third-party smelters to shorten its supply chain.
Cobalt is a key component in lithium-ion batteries, which are used in EVs. Cobalt allows the cathodes in the batteries to focus power in a confined space.

What if an owner of a Tesla installed solar panels that produced the electricity required to keep the car charged? How does that change the data?

It also doesn't make sense to me that a one time production of less than 5 kg cobalt that lasts at least 150,000 miles (the warranty period for a Tesla) would have a greater impact on air pollution than the drilling, pumping, refining, transporting and burning gasoline for 150,000 miles.

BTW, I drove a user of a plug-in Volvo and he told me he got 1200 miles on a tank of gas. Of course that tells me that most of his daily driving is within the 30 mile range of his batteries.

...with only a modicum of soothsaying, is freeing their cobalt slaves. I'm not entirely convinced it will mean much to them.

In the graphic what is described is the carbon cost of making the fucking batteries, process cost, which includes the mining of lithium, isolating it, trucking it around. If Elon Musk frees his cobalt slaves, batteries will still have a carbon cost involved in making them. The paper from which the graphic came didn't even refer to cobalt.

As for the electricity to charge the batteries, I've been informed in this space that engineers have managed solve all of the problems of the wind industry by making the vanes bigger and bigger and bigger in the industrial parks that used to be benthic ecosystems, this in connection with my posts on the short life times reported by the Danish Energy Agency. I was told "that's what engineers do."

Um...um...um...

And of course, the solar industry will be fine; the extreme weather, which in my opinion is tied to extreme global heating generated by reactionary wishful thinking, fear and ignorance, and mindless bourgeois (and ultimately very expensive) penny pinching with more than a dollop of fear and ignorance, that cut the power to the quartz mine in North Carolina didn't damage the mine. Maybe they can haul out a bunch of solar cells and Powerwalls to start the thing up, get the diesels started and help us on our happy way to nirvana.

However, right now, in 2024, an electric car on my grid is dirtier than an internal combustion engine, according to the reference cited.

Of course, we were going to industrialize New Jersey's coastal benthic shelf for a big wind industrial park. It's not happening, in my opinion, happily.

The disintegration of these giant wind turbines in offshore industrial parks has be widely reported. The whole fucking Vineland plant is shut while they try to figure it out. All of the external carbon costs of building Vineland are stranded. It's not the only place.

I'm familiar with all the soothsaying and "what if's" in connection with these wind and solar fantasies that to my mind left the planet in flames. I've been hearing it all for many decades, during which the planet's major arboreal ecosystems began bursting into flames.

And, of course, I heard all the time from my moral superiors that nuclear energy is "too expensive," unlike Hurricanes like Helene and now Milton and too many other to remember, the burned forests are not "too expensive," the air pollution deaths are not "too expensive," and of course, natural gas that keeps all this horseshit flowing is not "too expensive."

I find the whole idea that the reactionary approach of returning our energy system to dependence on the weather in order to support a bourgeois car CULTure and whatever to be intellectually insupportable.

To be perfectly clear, this kind of thinking leaves an appalling hole in my sense of decency.

One doesn't want to believe one hears these things, but one does.

Is it possible that a Hummer’s better for the environment than a Prius is?

https://slate.com/technology/2008/03/is-it-possible-that-a-hummer-s-better-for-the-environment-than-a-prius-is.html

...journalist of the type who has driven into climate change with reactionary "renewable energy will save us" horseshit.

The full paper is open sourced, and is written by three authors at Carnegie Mellon University, not some dumb shit journalist who might have lost his job if he took a science course and passed it with a grade of C or better.

Cleaning up while Changing Gears: The Role of Battery Design, Fossil Fuel Power Plants, and Vehicle Policy for Reducing Emissions in the Transition to Electric Vehicles Matthew Bruchon, Zihao Lance Chen, and Jeremy Michalek Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (8), 3787-3799

The corresponding author, Dr. Jeremey Michalek, has over 145 scientific publications, and his top ten papers have been cited well over 3000 times, his full output having been cited 7,523 times overall.

Jeremy J. Michalek

If someone wishes to write Dr. Michalek, whose h index is 42, to tell him that the scientific paper I cited reminds them of a 2008 article by a journalist in Slate his email is available. I wouldn't expect Dr. Michalek to take such a correspondence seriously.

Email: jmichalek@andrew.cmu.edu

I certainly don't take people seriously who criticize scientific publications - which is not to say such publications are infallible; they are not - by pointing some journalist's bullshit they read online in 2008. For the record, week 39 of 2008 (382.68 ppm, week beginning 9/28/2008), compared to week 39 of 2024, (421.95, week beginning 9/29/2024) involves CO₂ concentrations 39.27 ppm higher, measured in climate time, the degradation of the planetary atmosphere, the rate of which is accelerating, not decelerating despite trillions of dollars squandered uselessly on solar and wind.

The whole time since the publication, and actually much longer, way before 2008, I've been listening to stuff about how we didn't need nuclear energy because wind and solar were so great.

In my case, it actually goes back to 1976:

Of course, I could, and sometimes do, cite the famous paper from the "genius" antinuke Amory Lovins who told us we didn't need nuclear energy (in 1990 he predicted nuclear energy would lead to nuclear war) because, as he first opined in 1976, so called "renewable energy" is so great, especially when coupled to conservation. Of course, he wasn't writing in a scientific journal - or at least a physical science journal, which probably wouldn't have published his unreferenced tripe, but rather in Foreign Affairs.

Speaking only for myself, and no one else, it amazes me almost as much that people took that flake seriously as the current situation in which the orange criminal who wants back in the White House is taken seriously.

People took the nitwit Lovins seriously, and apparently still do, as he continues to issue oracles from his bourgeois green McMansion at Snowmass, just outside of that swell cocaine heaven Aspen. For a fee, one can tour his paradisical "renewable energy" home.

One hears these sorts of specious things, this with the fucking planet on fire where it isn't underwater because of extreme weather events, and one just really can't believe it.

I do think that armchair scientifically ill equipped critics of the scientific paper via would be better served moaning all about how doing what can seriously be done to slow, even arrest, if not reverse, extreme global heating, is "too expensive." They have no comment on whether the natural gas that prevents obviating the unreliably of wind and solar, recorded as extreme global heating driving extreme global weather is "too expensive." Who cares if we have to rebuild cities destroyed weather continuously?

As for me, holding this anti-science claptrap in the contempt it surely deserves, I'm something of an outlier, although I am very pleased that the Biden administration is correct in claiming to be the administration that is pushing for the largest sustained push to accelerate civil nuclear deployment in the United States in nearly five decades.

Joe Biden, in terms of energy policy, if not everywhere with respect to energy, but certainly in this case, his support for nuclear energy, will be recorded as being on the right side of history, snide comments from the peanut gallery notwithstanding.

I found it difficult to keep track of all the exclusions...

Evidence suggests that excluding certain life cycle stages or pollutants can alter results. Emission costs from the material supply chain, battery production, and automobile manufacturing stages are often substantively higher for PEVs, and excluding those stages from an analysis can underestimate the relative emission costs of PEVs or even change the direction of the result. Similarly, excluding certain CAPs may qualitatively change emission comparisons. For example, excluding SO2 (a large share of emission costs from coal plants without advanced abatement technologies and from battery manufacture) may underestimate the relative costs of PEVs. This may help explain why all studies in Table 2 that exclude CAPs are relatively favorable to PEVs, while all those including both CAPs and GHGs––echoing older studies including Weis et al. and Babaee et al. (2014)─find the answer is more pessimistic toward PEVs or lacks a consistent trend. (5,49)

It seems the main contention of the paper is how the electricity is generated but I'm not sure how they account for all the oil and gas an ICE vehicle consumes.

I wonder which has the higher environmental costs - battery manufacture or forging and casting ICE engine parts? How about all the rubber and plastic in an ICE vehicle? All the plumbing for heating and cooling (My Tesla uses a heat pump)?

I know the OP is asking about low mileage hybrids but I think my personal use case might be helpful.

I have been driving Uber/Lyft for over 8 yrs. 5 yrs ago I upgraded to a SUV that uses diesel. Gets relatively good MPG at around 22 (this isn't a figure taken from the car as I have found that to be incorrect on the high side (car says 24/25 when my spreadsheet is saying 22). Last year I drove just under 40k miles and paid $7500 for diesel. Oil changes every 12k or so. Replace an alternator for $2k. Also I rented cars for 2 weeks twice so a month of mileage isn't showing ( once to repair damage from being rear ended and once when the alternator went out).

I bought a 2021 Tesla Model Y long range in Dec w 39k on it. I'm driving about 5k miles a month. Charging at home for the vast majority of the time. Local utility is saying I'm using $5/day more this year than last which will come to about $2,000. Considering no oil changes, antifreeze, spark plugs, a considerable savings.

To date this year I have used 12,381 kWh to charge the Tesla with 91% from my home charger. BTW, my home charger adds approx 15% per hour from a 50 amp circuit. Local utility charges $.11 kWh. Local superchargers will do in 30 min or so what takes 5 hours at home but charge $38 kWh.

One thing to be aware of though - if your utility has demand pricing your cost to recharge could increase considerably. BTW, the Tesla has the ability to schedule charging during non-peak times.

I have a 4 kW solar system which I am looking to add to. Installed in Dec 2019 it has produced the following 2020 - 4708 kWh, 2021 - 4443 kWh, 2022 4450 kWh, 2023 4202 kWh. Didn't see in the paper how this would be considered.

There are those on this board that have EV's and enough solar to supply all their monthly needs, paying only a service charge for being connected to the grid.

BTW, I gave a ride to someone from a Volvo dealer that had the 90 class SUV plug-in hybrid. Told me he got 1200 miles on a tank of gas. That tells me that most of their daily driving is within the 30 mile range of the battery. The best part is if they go on a long trip its a gas car.

Last edited Sat Oct 12, 2024, 05:22 AM - Edit history (1)

reports on the external cost associated with manufacture of batteries, for one example, and is a report of general findings, not a poll of someone's happy experience or what someone told them.

Again, it doesn't matter if someone drives a plugin hybrid car 1200 miles because they plug it in. What matters is how the electricity on the grid is generated, and even when it is generated, which was the point of Dr. Michalek's paper.

I really don't give a fuck if someone only burns some gasoline in their fucking plugin Volvo because they plugged it in. What matters to me is how the electricity is generated.

In my grid, the PJM grid, which at roughly 400 grams CO₂/kWh is the same as that very dirty antinuke hellhole in Germany, an electric vehicle is dirty, because like Germany, our grid includes electricity generated by the combustion of coal.

There is no doubt that plugging in an electric car in almost any place on this planet dumps CO₂ on future generations, generations we clearly hold in contempt with our cheap little carbon shell games, almost in as much contempt as we hold for the laws of thermodynamics.

Electricity is, in general, a thermodynamically degraded form of energy, overwhelmingly produced by the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels with the waste dumped directly into the atmosphere. The carbon intensity of dangerous natural gas when used to generate electricity, is roughly 500 grams CO₂/kWh, coal double that, roughly CO₂.

I note that the external cost of that piece of shit wind industrial park off the coast of Massachusetts, all the carbon dioxide dumped for the barges that hauled the carbon intensive steel and concrete out to sea, all the external cost of the fiberglass blades, is now rotting in a once benthic wilderness now littered with plastic debris, the shuttered Vineland Wind facility.

I note that the engineers - I was informed in this space that wind engineers were geniuses for making bigger and bigger and bigger wind turbines something I found laughable - are "trying" to figure out the problem with the already unreliable systems.

It is now also understood that these pieces of crap will be even more unreliable than originally understood because of wake effects:

Experimental evaluation of fatigue in wind turbine blades with wake effects, Engineering Structures, Volume 300, 2024, 117140.

From the paper's conclusion:

There is obviously an energy cost associated with building an industrial wind park with lots of wind turbines in former wilderness beyond the external cost of putting this crap there in the first place, especially if the crap blows apart, which it seems to be doing.

I am told by people who excuse this sort of thing, that nuclear energy is "too expensive" because wind and solar are so great and so cheap. I actually believe something quite different, that the extreme global heating we are now observing as a result of the 3 card Monty game played by advocates of so called "renewable energy" - dependent on fossil fuels as a function of its extreme unreliability - is "too expensive." Given the extreme costs driven by extreme weather driven by extreme global heating, I think any other conclusion should be regarded with nothing less than complete disgust.

We are facing trillion dollar scale climate losses year after year despite having squandered trillions of dollars on solar and wind in the last decade alome, all of it lipstick on the fossil fuel pig.

An electric car is less polluting than anything that burns gas.

Proud of yourself for 50-60mpg. Tesla Model Y is rated at 130+mpg.

Google says...

Electric vehicles (EVs) have many advantages over gas-powered cars, including:

Cost: EVs are cheaper to drive in the long run, with lower fuel and maintenance costs. A 2018 University of Michigan study found that the average annual cost to fuel an EV was $485, compared to $1,117 for a gas-powered vehicle. EVs also have lower maintenance costs, typically costing half as much to maintain and repair as gas-powered cars.

Emissions: EVs are cleaner than gas cars, with lower lifecycle CO2 emissions. Burning gasoline releases carbon dioxide and other pollutants, contributing to air pollution and climate change.

Efficiency: EVs are more efficient than gas-powered cars, with electric-drive components that are highly efficient.

I am well aware of the dangerous and pernicious popular belief that electricity is "green."

I regard these as uninformed opinions, rather the equivalent to the belief that ivermectin cures Covid.

Ivermectin doesn't cure Covid and electricity isn't "green."

Chanting these opinions to the contrary repeatedly will not have any effect on the observed results of science.

Amory Lovins, the antinuke asshole who wrote this awful piece of bullshit, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?, often fires off numbers in his writing without explicitly stating whence they came. The text of "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" contains the word "Study" nine times, without a single fucking reference to the study itself that one could find. That's right, the "genius" antinukes most famous line of shit contains zero references, zero, and, in my opinion, zero sense.

Regrettably, the "road" he proposed was taken, with the result of extreme global heating, extreme global forest fires, extreme glacier melts, extreme weather, and extreme destruction of precious ecosystems.

I will have been here at DU for 22 years next month, hearing continuously these reactionary opinions about electric cars and so called "renewable energy", almost all of them involved with soothsaying as opposed to observation of real data. When I joined DU in 2022, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO₂ was 376.18 ppm. Here's what's reported this morning:

Week beginning on October 06, 2024: 422.17 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 418.47 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 395.73 ppm
Last updated: October 12, 2024

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

When I joined DU, the 52 week running average of weekly data in comparison to that ten years previously showed a rate of increase was 16.65 ppm/10 years. As of last week it was 25.45 ppm/10 years. Still the chants remain.

I've been listening, in increasing horror as these numbers worsen, to Lovinsian rhetoric being chanted the whole time I've been her, almost 22 years.

The data just posted from the Mauna Loa Observatory suggests so much for the value of all the chanting.

The Disastrous 2024 CO2 Data Recorded at Mauna Loa: Yet Another Update.

Of course, over the years, I watched Eloon Musk going from electric car hero to something quite different in the general sensibility of this website, although there is still traces of Tesla and Powerwall® worship here, quite clearly. The bullshit electric car fantasy, in all of its ugly manifestations, including but not limited to cobalt slavery, has done nothing, zero, zilch to address climate change.

Let me repeat something I've repeated previously in this thread:

The link is a "reference," and is coupled with a description of the credibility of the author, whose paper is filled with data and references, 54 of them, almost all to the primary scientific literature, in which Dr. Michalek himself is referenced over 7,500 times.

I have prided myself in my tenure here, when writing about the causes and effects of extreme global heating now observed in spite of all the chanting, battery worship, hydrogen worship, wind turbine worship, solar cell worship - all of which I argue has left the planet in flames - on citing the primary scientific literature and referencing it, as often as I can, explicitly. It should be clear where my ideas originate, although I have also learned to think critically about the places I go to form them.

I would contrast my approach with that of the "genius" of Amory Lovins, who in a Trumpian fashion likes to carry on about his big brain, unreferenced balderdash vaguely presented. Inside Amory Lovins Brain.



Fuck all the marketing! What I think of Lovins' brain is that it's fairly empty, and what is otherwise in it is ossified propaganda.

One of the advantages, I claim, of my approach of reading and citing direct sources in contrast to that of Lovins and his electric car/hydrogen car worshipping minions and fellow travelers is that in my approach to reality, in a long life in which I found my generation to be as disappointing as hell, is that I have been able to change my mind and do so by finding things out and reflecting upon them. If that's iconoclastic, so be it.

Once I was uneducated enough to have actually believed that people like Lovins and Musk were geniuses; among the last pleasures of life which is running out, is that I built a pretty good bullshit detector, of which I am proud. I have learned to detest Lovins and Musk and many similar people famous for alleged "genius." I may not be a genius, but I'm happy to claim I'm able to detect what isn't genius.

Have a nice weekend.

Link to tweet

But not a cross hybrid.

It's a 2015. I live in a walking town so it often sits for a while and the mileage I've put on it is very low. No problems at all with the big battery.

(The 12 volt battery needed replacing once, and those things are very expensive compared to the 12 volts for my old Civic.)

With an electric there's less maintenance than with a gas car (almost none). And you essentially have even more potential maintenance issues with a plug-in hybrid because you have two cars in one. We also had a problem with the battery prior to its warranty expiring and found out that you can't operate the car in the gas mode if the electric battery isn't working. Yes, you have two batteries.