It goes hand in hand with the prices. If you're going to spend that much more on a BEV, you want it to be different. And making it look different doesn't cost significantly more.

Also, car shape and style has so much to do with ICE vehicle design necessity.

The Hyundai Ioniq was like that, sadly they discontinued it

I got a Peugeot 208. It's small, and ok in all aspects except the software. Typical bad car UI. It works with cabled Android Auto, so for long drives that's more than fine. But touch screen is still old, and the app/site hasn't let me log in for a few weeks now... So I can't remote start heating.

But it's a great car that I bought used, for driving to and from work. Looks good, yellow color, parking sensors and rear camera for my blind ass. But is also probably not available in America for all I know, I live in Europe.

Oh yeah, forgot that one. Way too small for me, but a really nice car. If the Polestar 3 wasn't so stupid expensive, I'd love to get that.

Picked up a used 2022 Polestar 2 about 6 months ago for nearly half off. No regrets, because it’s an awesome car, and I strongly recommend it

Yes, availability in the US is much better. You can find a base ioniq 5 here easily now, but nobody wants those. Everyone wants the long range AWD.

Rivian and Lucid are exclusively luxury brands. Not shocked that they're having a hard time pushing cars over 100k CAD. I don't think they're atracting the same media attention either.

Personally, I'm keen to see if the proverbial doors get blown off the first few gens of electric cars, and the FOSS community makes headway.
I would happily buy an old Leaf if I knew we could handle all the software ourselves, and just do battery swaps when the range wasn't enough any more.

I have a terrible EV. Claims it has 80 miles of range but is really around 50 miles. A drive to work brings it down to 20%. The fast charge port is CHAdeMO, which at least around here is barely used, and even the electrify America places usually only have 1.

I still don't want to switch back, I just want a better one with a more common port. I work from home except for the occasional mandatory in office stuff (one coming this Thurs and probably another next month). Most of the stuff I want to drive to is within a battery's distance to go to and from. About the only thing that really sucks is vacations to visit family.

They arguably do in Australia, since the charging infrastructure is poor to non-existent in some places.

Melbourne, one of the major cities, has about seven charging stations for the entire metropolis. Until the charging network is built up more effectively, if you live there, it would make more sense to buy a PHEV to tide you over until it became practical to run electric all the time.

No. It all depends on how you drive it. If you just drive a PHEV around town and do the occasional road trip (which is how most people drive) then the ICE engine sees very little wear and requires very little service.

If you're doing constant road trips and burning up the road, a PHEV is not for you. And neither is an EV, honestly.

IMO its a great idea right now because IIRC 90% of round trips are 50 miles or less. So if you have a 200 mile battery, 75% of it is dead weight most the time. PHEVs remove the range anxiety present in most parts of the US with poor charger networks. Plus if battery manufacturing becomes a bottleneck in the near future it will be good to reduce the amount needed per car.

Maybe in the future good charger networks and much cheaper batteries will solve the problem but for the next 20 years I think PHEVs will fill an important role.

At the same time, a PHEV is a good stopgap if you live in a place with poor charging infrastructure. You might be able to charge enough to drive locally, but not when going some place farther afield. For example, I may be able to charge enough to drive around the neighbourhood from my socket, but literally half the city does not have any kind of EV charging capability, making a BEV unsuitable.

A PHEV would do better there, since I could switch to petrol if needed, and run in EV mode otherwise, and when charging infrastructure becomes good enough that I can live without the petrol part, then it might be worth switching to BEV.

PHEV in my opinion is a really dumb idea. It got popular, because it was an easy way for car manufacturers to continue making large SUVs and adhere to even stricter fuel efficiency restrictions, while also benefitting from generous state subsidies. Now that those subsidies are either scaled down or completely removed the PHEV sector is shrinking fast.

I'd argue that to be less of a issue with PHEV, since they weren't all that common to start with, and more of an issue with things like Mild Hybrids where the motor is just there to give the ICE a little boost, and precious little else.

With PHEV, the maintenance cost is higher than ICE, because at the end you need to service and maintain two engines.

I would be curious if they are. ECVT systems don't seem that much more complex than an equivalent automatic transmission, since the motor doubles as the starter and internal brake bands.

Maybe for the diesel-electric locomotive-type drivetrain that Opel's Ampera-E uses, since it's basically an EV with an onboard generator, but even then, maintenance costs could easily be offset by the ICE not running as often or as hard.

The catalytic converters of hybrid cars are often sought after because they are cleaner and don't see as much wear as their ICE counterparts. It would not be much of a stretch for that logic to extend to hybrid engines.