Phximiev said:
Its a good read and shows the car as an intermediate step as batteries evolve. One would hope that in a few years PHEVs will go the way of the dinosaur. If a car like the Bolt can be sold for $25k that might be the case.
My belief continues that it would sell well here in the US, but who knows when that will happen.
Reminds me of the conversation that I had with the Mark Mitsubishi service folks who informed me that the delays in bringing the car to the US were caused by the lack of manufacturing capacity for the batteries and as a result Mitsubishi built/bought(?) their own battery plant for the PHEV. I haven't seen anything to confirm this tho.
BTW, Honest John kinda reminds me of Robert Llewelyn.
Well Robert Llewellyn is an actor who made his name in the BBC Red Dwarf Sci-Fi comedy in the late 80s-1990s (though they have made recent series too with him in - if you can find a stream in the US, its well worth watching, well ahead of its time, very funny and entertaining). You can see Llewellyn as the Robocop C3P0 hybrid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxWN8AhNER0
Llewellyn only got involved in EV and green energy after the 'Cabled' IMIEV trial in 2001/2010 when he had a MIEV for a year, though his delivery nice to watch. He also did a few other series on TV a few years back.
Honest John is a pure motoring journalist, fairly dry, to the point, but his audience is the middle-aged white collar non-techie. HJ makes a lot of recommendations to the new car lease cohort, and that's a totally different buyer to me, who tends to buy used. That said, he does have a useful 'real world MPG' section, and a list of real owner reports and faults - which is a good addition lacking in most other places.
The problem with motoring journalists is they can only ever review at the time around the launch, there can be no incorporation of future trends and policy, nor long term reliability - that's were JD Power et al come in, and I take those as more useful, as I tent to be interested in the cars made about 3-5 years ago, as that's the age I buy at.
Maybe you just liken the two due to the dry-ish British delivery, with lack of coloured-up BS, as is the tradition here.
Back to the O-PHEV, you can read on HJ that reports of real world MPG are not nearly as good as the claims (I made ref to that before, becasue people buy for tax breaks rather than based around the driving they do= classifications to government tests vs real world use). That said, I think another reason the O-PHEV hasn't made it to the States yes is pure sticker price. In Europe and Japan, the sticker prices are higher than the US market equivalent, so a sale in these places is simply more profitable than one in the US. In the US, you also get longer fuller warranties, (10 years compared to 3-7 here), so it boils down to simple economics: profit margain.
I remember an old period in time around 2007 when I spent a few weeks in California and there was $2= £1, and I saw cars like the Chrysler 300C on sale for $20k, which would be £10K at the time, and that would be ludicrously cheap compared to UK sticker prices, where that would correspond to about 60% of the base sticker price for a low spec Civic... again at the time.
Time has moved on, and the £ isn't nearly as strong - so weak £ to Yen could also be a factor to US introduction, if when I beleive the UK is the 3rd largest consumer of O-PHEVs globally. Though if you can write most of the cost of the car off against corporation tax (as you can, which is why its so popular), perhaps sticker price becomes less important for the corporate purchase, which is in the same sort of bracket as an Audi A6/ BMW 5 - but far more cost effective than those two old models for the 'executive businessman'.
If, like so many people in the South of England, you value driving an automatic 4x4 SUV around permanently to take your kids to school and get groceries, then it makes complete sense to have electric drive, as an ICE variant is a totally pointless way of moving from A to B in the suburban environment. Also - and this is a crucial point somewhere like where I live; space is expensive, population density is high, and it costs £14 a day to take a car in to central London (if you were stupid enough to do it, as parking charges are astronomical) - then you arrive at a place where more people elect to have one car than 2, so an all-capable PHEV starts to make a bit more sense rationally. If I could only have one car, it would be a PHEV. Luckily I have a driveway and garage, so the IMIEV makes the good 2nd car - my wifes car as I stated was a RAV 4, now is an Insight Gen 2 (which I am looking to sell as it's had problems sadly), but the new wife-mobile is a tough decision, and likely to be a small SUV, just so I have what the IMIEV doesnt when we need it - though im not particularly looking forward to swapping one car for another with half the fuel economy - especially when she will now only drive an auto.
I have thought about the O-PHEV, but the used prices are holding up far better than I predicted... which also surprised me.
Lastly, I was under the impression that the O-PHEV shared a fair amount of drive similarity with the IMIEV, but perhaps the similarity away from the battery is less than I thought.
If you saw this fully charged episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt0-JMh6aS8
... then I learned that the British company GKN was behind the E-transaxle in the Leaf, O-PHEV and a raft of other vehicles. So, perhaps the O-PHEV moves away from a lot of the IMIEV traditional drivetrain.
