Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain
nissan-global.com151 points by mroche 19 hours ago
151 points by mroche 19 hours ago
I used to like hybrids, and obviously series hybrids are the coolest kind of hybrids, but now that I’m driving a budget EV, I honestly don’t see the point anymore. Just get the EV and skip the awkward half-way step that inherits the most expensive and complicated parts from both designs.
Seeing a sleek modern car pull away whisper quiet and then start the ICE 3 seconds later with a stutter and a puff of water vapor from underneath is the most schizophrenic sight, it somehow feels more dated than actual ICE cars.
Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute, an EV will likely work just fine for you.
I guess you don’t travel by car except for work commutes?
I’m a few years into PHEV ownership now, and I’m so glad I didn’t get an EV. Just a normal weekend trip to the beach or mountains (200-ish miles from the Triangle of NC either way) would mean I’d have to limit myself to hotels/Airbnbs with a charger. And chargers are VERY sparse everywhere I’ve been.
With my RAV4 Prime, I get 40-50 miles of EV range, enough that most days I use zero gas. But if I want to hit up the beach or mountains, or take a cross-country trip, or drive up to PA or VA to visit my girlfriend’s family, there’s zero hassle to find a charger. It just reverts to a normal hybrid once you run out of electric-only range (around 20% of the battery’s actual capacity).
It also performs far better than any EVs or ICEs I’ve seen anywhere close to its price point.
This “everyone should just have an EV” thing really reads like a modern “let them eat cake.”
I agree it's a bit privileged to expect people to start converting over to EVs wholesale, especially with the current political climate that's disincentivizing new EV production and charger networks. Moreover, as others point out, if you can't charge at home, the math and logistics stop being quite so favorable towards EVs.
However, as someone who made the jump to an EV a few years ago, if you can manage it it's more reasonable than a lot of people think. I too live in the Triangle of NC, and my current EV cheerfully gets me to the beach every year and up to visit family in Virginia without breaking a sweat. This year, I used ABRP (A Better Route Planner app) to plot out the beach drive and it was as smooth an experience as I've had making that trip. Yes, we had to stop for a charge (because I hadn't charged fully before we left), but I had the chance to grab a snack and stretch my legs for fifteen or twenty before setting out again, so I honestly didn't mind. A lot depends on where people need to go, but thus far I haven't found a lot of places where the chargers are so sparse I really had to worry about it.
I would have to stop once for 10-15 min to cover that 400-mile round trip in my EV (Hyundai Ioniq 5). I've driven 900-mile days, in the winter, through snow, without issue, in the same car. It takes marginally longer.
> It also performs far better than any EVs or ICEs I’ve seen anywhere close to its price point.
My own anecdote is that I vastly prefer driving an EV on road trips. The lack of noise and gear shifts, regen braking, etc., all make it a much less draining experience.
> This “everyone should just have an EV” thing really reads like a modern “let them eat cake.”
This is a very different story for countries that don't have high import tariffs on Chinese vehicles. EVs there are fast becoming the cheaper option.
self-driving is where it's at. BlueCruise, Comma.ai, Telsa FSD. Eventually insurance rates will come down for drivers that use such driver aids.
I don’t commute and I use the EV almost exclusively for trips, including a few countries over, but my EV also isn’t replacing the unique US model of “I spend half my waking hours driving a tank around 3rd world charging infrastructure”, so I can’t relate to some of the answers here.
> It also performs far better than any EVs or ICEs I’ve seen anywhere close to its price point.
Curious what you're using for comparison for "performs better." There are lots of 300-400+ HP EVs when you consider the cost of a RAV4 Prime ($41.5K-$50K USD)
Im curious how common a 200mile weekend trip actually is. Its been years since Ive driven even 100miles in a single trip
> bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute
If we put aside 5 hour commute, this describes central Tokyo, not bumfuck nowhere. Bumfuck nowhere has land for offgrid solar and therefore free home charging.
If the city you're in offers free roadside parking with L1 or L2 charging on light poles, good for you, but Tokyo and Japan at large isn't like that at all(unattended roadside parking is banned nationwide and robotic garages are everywhere).
If you're in the city a car shouldn't even be a major consideration (ideally).
That's true for majority of cases, but a small percentage of Tokyo that needs to visit places taxis and trains don't go is still a large number.
Thinking 10 years down the road, will autonomous rentals be geo-fenced and not suitable for multi-day trips to rural places?
Yeah, so few households that still own a car but don't use for commute choose cheaper ICEs that require no attention during weekdays. Then company cars driven weekdays when necessary remain ICE for familiarity as well as various EV chicken and egg problems.
A car should always be a major consideration for someone's needs. Especially if you have a family with young children or are disabled. Discounting cars as useless because mass transit exists is a terrible idea.
> robotic garages are everywhere
You park your car in a stall, get out of your car, and then the stall closes and it moves a platform under your car and stores it someplace. You punch in your claim number, pay your parking fee, and then it gets your car and puts it back in the stall.
They're in places other than Tokyo as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6blks7vfZog
One was featured in the old Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift movie. That was probably the first time I had seen one, about 20 years ago.
That's crazy awesome... I wish I'd had use for one where I live just to test it out LOL
Way back there was a news story about one of those, in which the owner didn't pay the licence fee for the software, so the software company bricked their parking garage with loads of people's cars inside.
City of Hoboken, NJ. Plenty of more recent stories about Hoboken using robots, so I guess it didn't put them off.
Oh yeah, here it is: https://m.slashdot.org/story/70742
(Edited to add: that account is disputed, in some accounts the city stopped maintainers working on it without realising it wouldn't keep working)
Unlike bumfuck nowhere, Tokyo offers decent public transportation. Right?
> Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute, an EV will likely work just fine for you.
Or do not have a garage, driveway, nor any other parking spot besides on the street, so can't charge at home.
If you live in large parts of the USA, by which I mean pretty much anything that is not the eastern seaboard or California, and you need to go anywhere remotely rural, charging infrastructure is absolutely not reliable.
I have an EV, which is amazing in my metro area, but I regularly take trips where I would not feel comfortable finding a place to charge, despite what EV locator maps might tell you. If you show up and that charger is not working, which is not uncommon, you might be stranded.
What EV? I have a 2020 Model 3 and in six years I've never had an issue with charging, even when driving around rural Montana & Idaho in the winter. I've never had a supercharging station be out of commission. Sometimes an individual stall or small group of stalls will be offline, but the car tells you which ones are broken so you don't waste time trying to charge at one.
We have a 2022 Leaf. Great city car; not so great out of town.
Just to be clear, that's an infrastructure problem, not a car problem. There aren't too many places you can drive in the US where you don't see a gas station at least every 50 miles, typically much more frequently. Charging stations are a completely different story.
You're talking about a car problem, not an infrastructure problem. The 2022 Leaf has an EPA range of either 149 or 212 miles depending on the model, and only has a 50kW or 100kW CHAdeMO port, which is slow to charge and doesn't allow you to use Tesla's Supercharger network. The battery management system uses air cooling, so charging rates are quickly limited by the pack heating up.
Also Nissan has instructed Leaf owners to not use DC fast charging, as doing so can cause battery fires. A recall has been issued, but no fix is available yet.[1]
1. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2025/RCLRPT-25V655-5278.pdf
9 times out of 10, when I have problems with a public charger, it's with some stupid app. I avoid chargers that are app only, and target those where I can just tap my debit card to pay (an actual card, not more smartphone tomfoolery). See also: parking apps.
It takes all of my willpower not to go full Ted Kaczynski some days.
This is one big advantage of having a Tesla and using their Supercharger network. I tried using 3rd party chargers a few times. The spotty reliability, annoying apps, & frustrating payment flows made me avoid them. With Tesla's network you just plug the car in. There's really no excuse for other vehicles & chargers being worse. ISO 15118 defines a plug & charge standard, which Tesla implements. Electrify America supports it as well, but vehicles often lack support for it, or require the vehicle owner to activate the feature.[1]
I've seen some chargers (non-Tesla) that support it, but only for CCS DC charging (which my Leaf doesn't have), not AC charging. Just tapping my debit card isn't much of an inconvenience, though plugging in and walking away does sound nice. However, I'm kind of suspicious of what data a car and charger is exchanging with Plug & Charge. In the privacy hell world we find ourselves in my guess is "all of it".
I agree I don’t like having both engines, more to fail. BUT I could see a world where you basically have basically an EV with a smaller battery pack (150 mile range) and basically a swappable $300 generator. I saw swappable so that if anything goes wrong they just swap it for $300, and credit you back async any recovery value. Just electricity generation from it, for rare needs of longer range. I think in theory, it could be a good way to get a cheaper EV supporting rare bursts of range and low maintenance cost.
But I’m not even sure regulators would allow such a design. Even then I’m not sure it’s worth it.
But I am totally done with ICE car maintenance. I want nothing to do with it anymore.
A cheap diesel/gasoline generator might do like 5kW, which is enough for overnight charging but not for range extension or powering the wheels. There were several pretty good range extended EVs (plugin hybrid with larger battery and smaller engine), like the Volt and BMW i3, those had small engines that mainly acted as generators for the battery, but with enough horsepower to at least keep you rolling on the highway. A $300 modular generator ain't quite gonna cut it.
I believe there's also a bunch of Chinese vehicles with similar design, entirely electric drivetrain with gas generators for range extension. Most of these will need to kick in before the battery is empty so that there's some stored energy buffer available for acceleration.
To put it in perspective why a 5kWh generator isn't a range extender: my lightening has a range of 331 miles and 135kWh battery. If we assume a spherical cow (60mph, and I get every single one of those 331 miles), the truck buns through the battery in 5.5 hours, which equates to 24.5kWh to keep up.
In actuality, at highway speeds I'll burn through 80% of the battery in 3 hours which equals a run rate of 36kWh. If we ran a 5kWh generator the whole time and assume perfect charging efficiency, it'd extend the time to charge by 28 minutes.
My Chevrolet Bolt actually shows me the real-time kW draw from the high voltage battery and, while it's highly dependent on driving conditions, it seems to require around 12-15 kW to maintain 60 MPH on a flat dry road using cruise control and with the climate control turned off. It's not the most efficient model on the market, but it's also far from the least; as you noted your F-150 would need significantly more energy under the same conditions.
The lightning is ridiculous, it weight 70% more than your bolt and is huge.
My partner and I honestly bought it to be a whole house backup battery. My regions get ice storms and we have hundreds of gallons of aquariums we'd need to keep powered through a long duration power outage. 135 kwh of battery storage cost more than the 135kwh battery truck, so we got a whole house battery backup system with wheels and cruise control. It can backstop 80 amps for 3 days.
If it were me I'd just get a whole house generator in that situation, seems like it would be a lot less than the truck with batteries or the batteries. The bonuses are I wouldn't need to replace an expensive truck with another expensive truck in the future if I didn't want to. 3 days is impressive, but I had an ice storm leave my family without power for 3 weeks once.
It's pretty strange that 135kwh of stationary batteries are more expensive than 135kwh with a truck attached, seems like some one must be running a screw job on the storage batteries.
We've had pretty poor experiences with generators in the past. A whole house generator is very expensive, especially with a transfer switch. Without a transfer switch you have to run the generator outside and route power inside through a window left ajar, which is not great when the ice storm has happened. The truck is parked in an insulated garage and is easy to route power from.
3 days is impressive if you're pulling maximum you can from the truck, if you pull anything less than that your time is greater. Our aquariums do not require all 80 amps. Max length power outage for us has been a week and the truck will easily last that long.
And totally agree about the cost of battery power banks. This was a few years ago, so things might be different now.
For what it's worth you get fairly similar results if you assume an efficiency for a ICE engine (25-40% depending on a lot of things) and work backwards from the energy density of the fuel and the milage you achieve over a trip.
I think you mean kw. The kWh rating is basically just how big the gas tank is.
Technically correct for the rating of the generator output capacity, I was just meeting OP where they were at and they used kwh as a unit for the generator. At the end of the day, that nuance isn't all that important
Using the right units is definitely important. I don't know why we've just decided they don't matter in this regard.
The bmw i3 range extender engine only generates 19kw of electricity. It doesn't allow you to "fill up and drive anywhere" like a car. It is more like a bigger battery.
I think the solution is actually what we have now - high-power dc fast chargers spread around the country.
Why not towable gas generator trailers that you can rent for long trips.
Hook it on, plug the connector up and attach your license plate to the back (or use eink).
Alternatively, put a battery in that trailer. See for example https://far-a-day.com/en: “Like an external phone battery, but for your car!”
Years ago I saw some one who had sawed off the back end of a late 1980s Chevy cavalier (or similar) and turned it into a portable generator trailer for his EV. This was so long ago it was probably an EV conversion of some kind.
There used to be a really classic old website called Mr. Sharkey (you can see some of it on archive.org). He was into a number of different weird and wonderful hobbies. One of them was a VW Rabbit powered by something like a 24hp DC motor and lead acid batteries.
One of the most interesting projects he did was to build a trailer from the front clip of a similar VW Rabbit, engine and transmission etc. He then used this trailer in a pusher configuration to take the electric VW Rabbit on extended trips. The engine was controlled by a hand throttle in the car. Apparently the handling was surprisingly acceptable in this configuration.
Edit - Found the link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121105135914/http://www.mrshar...
> for rare needs of longer range.
Hmm. Supposing we need a 6 hour drive at 20 kWh per hour (eschewing specific speed/distance figures), and a generous "smaller battery pack" can provide 3 hours (60 kWh). Then the generator must supply the missing 60 kWh during the 6 hour interval, i.e. a 10 kW generator.
Google says those cost from 1k to 5k USD, and they seem rather beefy.
(Just doing the math out of curiosity, otherwise agree with you.)
Yeah... My 7kwh generator is the size of a large wheelbarrow and weighs a good 250 lbs.
Not to mention, loud as all get out at that size.
It also needs a decent amount of maintenance to keep it running (or it needs to run frequently).
Personally... Ev with a swappable battery seems like a much better solution.
The only reason this even sorta makes sense right now is that we're in a really weird transition period where gas is available everywhere and it's still hard to find batteries/chargers.
This isn't a tech problem, it's an infrastructure problem. It should be treated that way.
You might be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended-range_electric_vehicl...
It's not exactly what you're describing, but I think it will become more common as battery technology growth slows down.
I’m not sure why you’d offer a drop in option if you can just build it into the car. Extended-range electric vehicle (EREV) / Range Extender Electric Vehicle (REEV) do exist on the market already.
A more practical solution is to just rent out a small generator on a trailer.
Unless I’ve completely misunderstood what you’re getting at.
> swappable $300 generator
It's never that simple, but it could be. Modular standard parts that could be installed on a standard chassis design would be great. So have a small generator or an additional battery, maybe even a fuel cell. Probably never happen but it would be the nirvana of car design. Standardization would drive scale and it could work really well. That approach did wonders for the PC industry.
> I used to like hybrids
I think that is a transition issue with most tech.
Like when film cameras were first transitioning to digital there was a lot of reasons you wouldn't just glom onto digital. Early digital cameras had low resolution (or files were huge), bad dynamic range, either terrible lenses or didn't work well with slr lenses, etc.
I remember when tesla came out with the first EVs the batteries had ridiculous/expensive capacity compared to other EVs (compare 90kwh to a leaf with like a leaf was 24kwh). Hybrids made sense because EV range was either poor or expensive or both. And charger infrastructure was barely getting started.
Now it is different.
Also city dwellers with street parking and it’s hard charge, so a pure EV is a bad fit.
Hybrids with their good mileage although complex are a good fit for those.
I thought this but after 3 years I can say it is unfounded. the only reason I ever think about my state of charge on the city is when I need it to be low so I can use street parking that requires me to charge.
We really need more slow charging stations for folks to just park at. I’d have assumed that the economics would have been favorable to charge by the day/night rather than by the minute.
Every street lamp has 15a of power already running to it. It would be trivial to add an outlet to each one.
There’s a genuine technical issue: the AC EVSE protocols (J1772, NACS, etc) have several safety features that are far in excess of anything you’ll find in a regular 15A NEMA receptacle. I don’t think it would be wise to gave high traffic NEMA receptacles on fully weather-exposed streetlights.
The hardware for the safety systems would not be expensive in volume, but the cable and connector are expensive and bulky. And none of the EVSE standards are specified in a variant where the receptacle is fixed and the car carries the cable.
This is solvable, obviously. I don’t know whether drivers would want to deal with having their own cables, though.
Having your own cable for AC (here it's Type 2) is the norm in Europe, so I'd say it's survivable.
AIUI, Tesla really screwed the pooch here. For the original Model S, Tesla really really wanted the US model to tuck the charge socket under the little hinged reflector, and they couldn’t figure out how to fit the Type 2 “Mennekes” connector their. So they invented their own socket (which evolved into NACS), and the Tesla one is rather inferior to Type 2, at least when used for AC charging.
And now every EV needs to have a different charge port configuration for North America vs Europe, and North America is stuck with NACS. (NACS is fine for DC but still sucks for AC. It cannot support 3-phase charging (which I admit has always seemed like a silly feature except in the limited case of 1 or 2 chargers in a single family residence), and cables and adapters cannot passively report their current rating. So you would need to build a kind of gnarly active MITM system to make a safe extension cable, whereas a Type 2 to Type 2 cable is built part of the Type 2 design.
Later, Tesla proved the whole thing pointless by successfully fitting Type 2 in the same location…
I think the timeline is a bit off. When Tesla designed its connector, Type 2 wasn’t yet the established European standard. Tesla had shown its proprietary connector by 2011 and shipped it in 2012; Type 2 wasn’t selected as Europe’s common connector until 2013.
When Tesla later engineered the European Model S, it needed three-phase AC and adopted a modified Type 2 connector, which fitted behind essentially the same tail light door.
But that’s all history now.
Arguably both markets ended up with good solutions for their needs: NACS is exceptionally compact and well suited to North American single-phase AC plus DC fast charging, while Type 2 is larger but supports Europe’s widespread three-phase AC.