Electric buses in the UK have been charged with diesel generators and there was a bit of an uproar about it at first, but a large static diesel generator running at a constant speed can be more efficient than multiple stop/start diesel engines, and therefore more friendly to the environment.
Usually seen as a stop-gap until they can get the power upgraded in the depot to support multiple charging buses.
Stellantis is still producing 400V EVs with below-average efficiency. Their cars display estimated range based on their marketing number rather than real battery condition and driving history, so the range drops by 1.6 miles for every mile driven.
A lot of range anxiety would go away if their EV tech wasn't crap.
Interestingly, brands like Mercedes do the opposite - a recent test by What Car? indicated that the real (UK) highway range of the GLC 400 4Matic Electric is just 1.4% lower than its WLTP rating - 390 miles vs 394.
I don't know about anyone else, but I always needed a short break after 450km or so. Those 390 miles are more than I would ever use without stopping to charge.
Germans car manufacturers are known to underrate. Horsepower, MPG, even BMW speedometers are under by 2-3mph. At least customers are pleasantly surprised when it's better than advertised.
Those 390 miles are from 100 to empty and you don’t do that in real life.
Usually on long trip stops I charge to 75% because after that it becomes painfully slow to charge the rest of 25. And I rarely stop below 20%, because of, eh, low battery stress.
So in reality I have to stop at half of the advertised range.
For people thinking that pure ev + backup generator is more reliable than PHEV, i recommend this video : Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars from Technology Connections
It explains why PHEV is actually a very clever idea and now it simplifies things not complicates them.
I enjoy that guy, but I've found he is wrong about what he talks about in several situations. This is probably one of them, but we'll see once the EREVs are tested. His argument here is basically, "The Volt wasn't fuel efficient so EREVs can't be". Ignoring all the has been learned about EVs since then. Plus he ignores that PHEVs and Hybrids are more complex than an EREV because they need complex transmissions and other subsystems because they need to be both an EV and an ICE vehicle.
I have an EV and a hybrid, and the EV is so much better than the hybrid - I will happily swap the hybrid for an EREV when the time comes.
"so much better" is very multidimensional. If we talking about acceleration, sure you cant beat EV. but if you take generator in the trunk in to consideration and measure "better" on miles per galon then results might be different.
It's new in that it's not really a hybrid. It isn't meant to take over when you run out of battery. It's meant as an emergency recharge for the battery to get you to the next charging station.
Hybrids can just run on gas and not have to worry about the distance to the next charging station.
That’s a bit of a stretch… most of the announced EREVs are using pretty conventional 4 or even 6-cylinder engines (like the 3.6L Pentastar V6 in the upcoming Jeep Wagoneer REEV). Even though it isn’t connected to the wheels, the engine is capable of keeping the car charged and running normally once the battery runs out. AFAIK, the intention is to be able to drive for hundreds of miles on the engine, not just limp along a dozen or so miles to get to a charger.
3rd sentence: It is a fully electric car with the security blanket of a gas-powered generator to charge the battery. So not your average hybrid whos gas-powered motor directly drives the wheels.
> running generator to charge battery to drive the wheels is somehow better than just driving wheels directly
In some ways it is, yes. The engine design is not the same, it doesn't need gearbox, variable power output etc to charge battery. In some ways it can be more efficient.
from the article: "Most plug-in hybrids on the road today are essentially gasoline vehicles with a battery shoehorned in to provide a small amount of all-electric range. EREVs [Extended Ranged Electric Vehicles] flip the concept. They are designed first as electric vehicles, and the engine solely acts as a generator for the battery, with no mechanical connection to the wheels."
This is EREV (Extended-Range Electric Vehicle) where the fossil fuel engine is used solely to charge the battery, as opposed to a PHEV (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle) where it can also drive the wheels.
Either way, the cost is that the vehicle has the complexity of both systems. The benefit is variable, YMMV (Your milage may vary). There must be cases where it's a good idea. Especially at present, while the energy supply systems are in transition.
Wait, how does one of these new extended range EV’s have the complexity of both systems?
To me it looks like it has the complexity of a pure EV with generator in the back seat, and the charging cord plugged into the generator. Which does away with much of the complexity, in part because the generator doesn’t have to turn the wheels.
> Wait, how does one of these new extended range EV’s have the complexity of both systems
because it obviously has both a battery+electric motor system and a gasoline storage+ICE motor system? It has both systems. It can only be much more complex than a pure EV.
I take the point that EREV could be simpler than other designs that have both motor systems - the PHEV option, in the "it could always be worse" sense. But pure EVs are actually much simpler than ICE vehicles or hybrids.
renault already put out some of these cars a few years ago, with this system you could get up to 1000km with a full gas tank! Just what my much cheaper diesel always could do!
We have owned two. Trouble-free EV and trouble-free motor. The over-engineered little electrical actuators (for trunk, for gas-door opener) were our maintenance costs. The US only offers a single, dreadful tire in the correct size (Bridgestone Ecopia), which is the true achilles heel of the thing. The tiny tires seem to be made of discarded twix wrappers, are super expensive, and get destroyed by potholes and road hazards.
They're lovely little city bugs and just a pleasant place to be inside.
I drove an i3 rex, first generation. The gas motorcycle engine loved breaking down, due to disuse. Such an unreliable offence of crap.
According to the dealership mechanic, the engine was packaged in a way that made the fluids collect in places they shouldn't.
I have driven the entire east coast on mine. I have put 60k miles in mine. All trouble free. Best car I have ever owned. If I have time on a trip I charge up and if I don’t I just use gas. That mechanic was pulling your leg.
First generation? According to Wikipedia and the few websites I could find, in American models, the rex had a different control setup that was simpler then here in Germany.
Not malicious. I think you edited your comment after I commented. You mentioned driving an i3, could have been a friends or a test drive, and a mechanics opinion. The opinion did’t match my experience. I commented on my experience which was overwhelmingly positive with no mechanical
Issue ever. From my perspective the thread was complete at that point and there was no need for further comment. Anything beyond that was both of our faults and just being argumentative.
Audi had a prototype of the Audi e-Tron with a compact Wankel gas engine as range extender. That was in 2010, but it was cancelled and never entered mass production.
The BMW i3 used what was basically a scooter engine. The Ampera/Volt used what was essentially an Opel Corsa engine (from memory).
Toyota's approach of using a small battery and modified atkinson cycle engine seems to have paid off. Taxi drivers love them and fuel economy is pretty consistent. But the engine is a core part of the process. So it isn't dead weight a lot of the time.
The real question is whether an 'Extended Range EV' is using a motor intended to work efficiently as just a generator or whether it's another parts bin special.
Diesel-generated electrical propulsion in ships have been a thing for a long time. You can use several generators and only fire up the ones you need for the power you need and the ones running can do so in or near their optimal efficiency zones. You can also do away with the weight and mechanical losses from gear boxes because the electric motors don't need them.
I worked on unmanned ground vehicles that did this... 10 years ago. In fact we designed them from scratch.
FWIW, now you have all the same joys of engine maintenance that one has with a traditional ICE car: oil changes, oil filter changes, spark plug replacement, starter replacement, coolant, probably an alternator, etc, along with needing to worry about an IG bolted on to the side of the engine connected to an MV bus. It is a complex design.
Less maintenance the traditional engine. well assuming you plug it in of course but if you're plugging it in you're only using the edge for longer trips and so you're going to save a lot of money while still having range to make longer trips. Of course there is some worry about the gas going stale if you never run that engine. On the other hand gas engines get more efficient the higher the load and so a generator optimized for the engine gets everything running at optimal is going to get roughly 40% fuel energy efficiency versus a normal car which is going to be close to 20 - that was the main promise of a hybrid all along.
I have a PHEV where the engine has about a thousand hours on it my previous car driven about the same would have had about three thousand hours on it. But there are definitely plenty of reports of people who have the plugging hybrids who never actually plug it in it so don't see this advantage.
I can tell you from experience it really isn't much less. Stale gas, dry-rotted hoses, dry/cracked seals, failed starter, fried ECU, fried coolant pump. Also account for the entire other subsystem, the IG. A complex subsystem with an entirely different set of warts: shredded splines, cracked coolant lines, corroded LV/MV connectors, leaky coolant lines, fused contactor.
Perhaps the most salient point is how it isn't great for the battery. Your BMS system needs to be amazing to make sure the battery cells charge relatively evenly or you'll start frying cells. Even if it is amazing, you'll probably fry cells.
It works extremely well at adding range to an EV ground vehicle, I saw it work and it was really cool. The amount of headache it added relative to a pure EV vehicle was just incredible.
Edit: to add, a PHEV is only notionally comparable to this system. Your engine probably ran every 2nd-erd time you drove it. If people don't start and run their engine once a month, just like a home generator (and nobody does that) the problems multiply.
I don't wish to argue with you, this was my day job for a long time, spent as much time with a meter as I did writing software on that program, it was really fun. The reliability was pretty meh.
Mechanics often have a skewed perspective, though, and so I don't necessarily trust your experience because you see that bad cases.
The reality is a modern engine is very reliable in general and yes, seals will go out but that's more a matter of time and I expect to see that in any car in 10 years. Although I have no information on the particular engine in the case here and so maybe this is a particularly bad engine but that's not an indictment against the concept itself. If a modern gas engine car can't go 300,000 miles, it's because the body has failed, not because the engine failed. Sure, you'll have some maintenance, but it is well known and fairly cheap considering all the work the car is doing.
I'm not clear what you were doing with an engine then. Unless you were part of the design team finding and fixing bugs and making the engines reliable for the rest of us.
Again, the Volt already blazed this trail since 2011. The engine automatically comes on at least once every 6 weeks, and overall ensures that a single tank of gas doesn’t stay for more than ~6 months IIRC. I’ve never heard of any fuel-related engine problems on Volts.
Sounds like what Mazda did with the MX-30 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazda_MX-30) which flopped hard. They used their new Wankel engine as range extender, perfect use case since the power:weight ratio of these is impressive.
Low effort? How about low effort screaming "buy Tesla or you are nazi" around 2016-2019?
Or when we tried to have a civilized discussion about low powered ICE engines, versus 2 ton luxury heavy battery cars?
The green crowd always mainly ran on low effort shit posts with state sponsoring. It is just laws of physics and politics did not really worked out as you imagined!
It’s charging facilities being down far too frequently, whereas gas stations are rarely bone dry.
It’s sites lying about charging port availability, leading to wasted range on red herrings (thanks for lying about NACS chargers, Sheetz!).
It’s the anxiety of not knowing whether a charging area will be safe to hang out in for half an hour, unlike a gas station where you can pump and run pretty quickly if necessary.
The anxiety doesn’t come from a “limited” range (especially when gas vehicles get comparable or worse ranges); it’s the experience surrounding charging itself that needs improvement. One series of service stations offering reliably available charging ports with both plug standards and offering clean bathrooms, hot food, and space to wait in, is what’s needed to soothe “range anxiety”.
Electric buses in the UK have been charged with diesel generators and there was a bit of an uproar about it at first, but a large static diesel generator running at a constant speed can be more efficient than multiple stop/start diesel engines, and therefore more friendly to the environment.
Usually seen as a stop-gap until they can get the power upgraded in the depot to support multiple charging buses.
Stellantis is still producing 400V EVs with below-average efficiency. Their cars display estimated range based on their marketing number rather than real battery condition and driving history, so the range drops by 1.6 miles for every mile driven.
A lot of range anxiety would go away if their EV tech wasn't crap.
Interestingly, brands like Mercedes do the opposite - a recent test by What Car? indicated that the real (UK) highway range of the GLC 400 4Matic Electric is just 1.4% lower than its WLTP rating - 390 miles vs 394.
I don't know about anyone else, but I always needed a short break after 450km or so. Those 390 miles are more than I would ever use without stopping to charge.
Germans car manufacturers are known to underrate. Horsepower, MPG, even BMW speedometers are under by 2-3mph. At least customers are pleasantly surprised when it's better than advertised.
Those 390 miles are from 100 to empty and you don’t do that in real life.
Usually on long trip stops I charge to 75% because after that it becomes painfully slow to charge the rest of 25. And I rarely stop below 20%, because of, eh, low battery stress.
So in reality I have to stop at half of the advertised range.
For people thinking that pure ev + backup generator is more reliable than PHEV, i recommend this video : Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars from Technology Connections
It explains why PHEV is actually a very clever idea and now it simplifies things not complicates them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnUFH5GX_fI
I enjoy that guy, but I've found he is wrong about what he talks about in several situations. This is probably one of them, but we'll see once the EREVs are tested. His argument here is basically, "The Volt wasn't fuel efficient so EREVs can't be". Ignoring all the has been learned about EVs since then. Plus he ignores that PHEVs and Hybrids are more complex than an EREV because they need complex transmissions and other subsystems because they need to be both an EV and an ICE vehicle.
I have an EV and a hybrid, and the EV is so much better than the hybrid - I will happily swap the hybrid for an EREV when the time comes.
"so much better" is very multidimensional. If we talking about acceleration, sure you cant beat EV. but if you take generator in the trunk in to consideration and measure "better" on miles per galon then results might be different.
Also I’d separate HEV and PHEV. I agree a HEV is kinda of meh but PHEVs are, at least for me and getting around the city, the best of both worlds.
Indeed this. A range extender engine will never be as efficient as hybrid
"New"? Like hybrids haven't been around forever?
It's new in that it's not really a hybrid. It isn't meant to take over when you run out of battery. It's meant as an emergency recharge for the battery to get you to the next charging station.
Hybrids can just run on gas and not have to worry about the distance to the next charging station.
That’s a bit of a stretch… most of the announced EREVs are using pretty conventional 4 or even 6-cylinder engines (like the 3.6L Pentastar V6 in the upcoming Jeep Wagoneer REEV). Even though it isn’t connected to the wheels, the engine is capable of keeping the car charged and running normally once the battery runs out. AFAIK, the intention is to be able to drive for hundreds of miles on the engine, not just limp along a dozen or so miles to get to a charger.
3rd sentence: It is a fully electric car with the security blanket of a gas-powered generator to charge the battery. So not your average hybrid whos gas-powered motor directly drives the wheels.
somehow it makes you think that running generator to charge battery to drive the wheels is somehow better than just driving wheels directly :)
"not your average hybrid whos gas-powered motor directly..."
> running generator to charge battery to drive the wheels is somehow better than just driving wheels directly
In some ways it is, yes. The engine design is not the same, it doesn't need gearbox, variable power output etc to charge battery. In some ways it can be more efficient.
The Prius isn't really using a gearbox in the conventional sense either, it's much simpler.
You are describing what the Volt was doing back in 2011
Indeed. This headline had me feel like I was taking crazy pills. As far as I can tell, this is in no way, shape or form a "New Idea".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Volt_(first_generati...
Diesel electric locomotives have been using this concept since the 1930s or 1940s.
Also the Nazi's Maus tank/armoured vehicle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer_VIII_Maus
2 things can be true: the 2011 Volt would be classified as an EREV, and "your average hybrid" would not.
No, this design is not totally new. Despite the article implying this.
from the article: "Most plug-in hybrids on the road today are essentially gasoline vehicles with a battery shoehorned in to provide a small amount of all-electric range. EREVs [Extended Ranged Electric Vehicles] flip the concept. They are designed first as electric vehicles, and the engine solely acts as a generator for the battery, with no mechanical connection to the wheels."
This is EREV (Extended-Range Electric Vehicle) where the fossil fuel engine is used solely to charge the battery, as opposed to a PHEV (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle) where it can also drive the wheels.
Either way, the cost is that the vehicle has the complexity of both systems. The benefit is variable, YMMV (Your milage may vary). There must be cases where it's a good idea. Especially at present, while the energy supply systems are in transition.
Wait, how does one of these new extended range EV’s have the complexity of both systems?
To me it looks like it has the complexity of a pure EV with generator in the back seat, and the charging cord plugged into the generator. Which does away with much of the complexity, in part because the generator doesn’t have to turn the wheels.
> Wait, how does one of these new extended range EV’s have the complexity of both systems
because it obviously has both a battery+electric motor system and a gasoline storage+ICE motor system? It has both systems. It can only be much more complex than a pure EV.
I take the point that EREV could be simpler than other designs that have both motor systems - the PHEV option, in the "it could always be worse" sense. But pure EVs are actually much simpler than ICE vehicles or hybrids.
renault already put out some of these cars a few years ago, with this system you could get up to 1000km with a full gas tank! Just what my much cheaper diesel always could do!
Could be an obvious mistake in the title to drive engagement, or as someone said in the comments of the article:
> WSJ catering to the anti EV crowd to get them to say "Har har look at those silly EVs, needs a gas engine now."
no no no no no no you don't get it.
there are EVs! with a backup generator.
but are EVs so they get all those sweet incentives
BMW i3 REx with range extending petrol engine was released in 2014.
We have owned two. Trouble-free EV and trouble-free motor. The over-engineered little electrical actuators (for trunk, for gas-door opener) were our maintenance costs. The US only offers a single, dreadful tire in the correct size (Bridgestone Ecopia), which is the true achilles heel of the thing. The tiny tires seem to be made of discarded twix wrappers, are super expensive, and get destroyed by potholes and road hazards.
They're lovely little city bugs and just a pleasant place to be inside.
I drove an i3 rex, first generation. The gas motorcycle engine loved breaking down, due to disuse. Such an unreliable offence of crap. According to the dealership mechanic, the engine was packaged in a way that made the fluids collect in places they shouldn't.
I have driven the entire east coast on mine. I have put 60k miles in mine. All trouble free. Best car I have ever owned. If I have time on a trip I charge up and if I don’t I just use gas. That mechanic was pulling your leg.
First generation? According to Wikipedia and the few websites I could find, in American models, the rex had a different control setup that was simpler then here in Germany.
2018
And I was driving the 2013. So I rest my case.
I rest my case as well. You should have kept your case to first generation.
Is this malicious? It's right there, first sentence "I drove an i3 rex, first generation"
Not malicious. I think you edited your comment after I commented. You mentioned driving an i3, could have been a friends or a test drive, and a mechanics opinion. The opinion did’t match my experience. I commented on my experience which was overwhelmingly positive with no mechanical Issue ever. From my perspective the thread was complete at that point and there was no need for further comment. Anything beyond that was both of our faults and just being argumentative.
Audi had a prototype of the Audi e-Tron with a compact Wankel gas engine as range extender. That was in 2010, but it was cancelled and never entered mass production.
https://www.carsuk.net/audi-a1-e-tron-wankel-range-extender-...
Every time they try and do this, it fails. The math is very much against you with converting energy this way and obviously they haven't solved that.
This seems to be a huge investment to make just to try and market the same technology but better this time.
The REX issue is an interesting one.
The BMW i3 used what was basically a scooter engine. The Ampera/Volt used what was essentially an Opel Corsa engine (from memory).
Toyota's approach of using a small battery and modified atkinson cycle engine seems to have paid off. Taxi drivers love them and fuel economy is pretty consistent. But the engine is a core part of the process. So it isn't dead weight a lot of the time.
The real question is whether an 'Extended Range EV' is using a motor intended to work efficiently as just a generator or whether it's another parts bin special.
Diesel-generated electrical propulsion in ships have been a thing for a long time. You can use several generators and only fire up the ones you need for the power you need and the ones running can do so in or near their optimal efficiency zones. You can also do away with the weight and mechanical losses from gear boxes because the electric motors don't need them.
“New idea” ? The Chevy volt had this in 2010.
"New idea", lol. Diesel locomotives have worked this way since the 1920s.
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/carmakers-have-a-new-idea...
Apparently the first modern vehicle to have this was indeed the BMW iREX.
However, the first vehicle to have this at all was some 1901 Porsche model...
I worked on unmanned ground vehicles that did this... 10 years ago. In fact we designed them from scratch.
FWIW, now you have all the same joys of engine maintenance that one has with a traditional ICE car: oil changes, oil filter changes, spark plug replacement, starter replacement, coolant, probably an alternator, etc, along with needing to worry about an IG bolted on to the side of the engine connected to an MV bus. It is a complex design.
The maintenance on these will be quite expensive.
Less maintenance the traditional engine. well assuming you plug it in of course but if you're plugging it in you're only using the edge for longer trips and so you're going to save a lot of money while still having range to make longer trips. Of course there is some worry about the gas going stale if you never run that engine. On the other hand gas engines get more efficient the higher the load and so a generator optimized for the engine gets everything running at optimal is going to get roughly 40% fuel energy efficiency versus a normal car which is going to be close to 20 - that was the main promise of a hybrid all along.
I have a PHEV where the engine has about a thousand hours on it my previous car driven about the same would have had about three thousand hours on it. But there are definitely plenty of reports of people who have the plugging hybrids who never actually plug it in it so don't see this advantage.
> Less maintenance the traditional engine.
I can tell you from experience it really isn't much less. Stale gas, dry-rotted hoses, dry/cracked seals, failed starter, fried ECU, fried coolant pump. Also account for the entire other subsystem, the IG. A complex subsystem with an entirely different set of warts: shredded splines, cracked coolant lines, corroded LV/MV connectors, leaky coolant lines, fused contactor.
Perhaps the most salient point is how it isn't great for the battery. Your BMS system needs to be amazing to make sure the battery cells charge relatively evenly or you'll start frying cells. Even if it is amazing, you'll probably fry cells.
It works extremely well at adding range to an EV ground vehicle, I saw it work and it was really cool. The amount of headache it added relative to a pure EV vehicle was just incredible.
Edit: to add, a PHEV is only notionally comparable to this system. Your engine probably ran every 2nd-erd time you drove it. If people don't start and run their engine once a month, just like a home generator (and nobody does that) the problems multiply.
I don't wish to argue with you, this was my day job for a long time, spent as much time with a meter as I did writing software on that program, it was really fun. The reliability was pretty meh.
Mechanics often have a skewed perspective, though, and so I don't necessarily trust your experience because you see that bad cases.
The reality is a modern engine is very reliable in general and yes, seals will go out but that's more a matter of time and I expect to see that in any car in 10 years. Although I have no information on the particular engine in the case here and so maybe this is a particularly bad engine but that's not an indictment against the concept itself. If a modern gas engine car can't go 300,000 miles, it's because the body has failed, not because the engine failed. Sure, you'll have some maintenance, but it is well known and fairly cheap considering all the work the car is doing.
I’m a staff software engineer. :)
I'm not clear what you were doing with an engine then. Unless you were part of the design team finding and fixing bugs and making the engines reliable for the rest of us.
Won't gas just varnish if you don't ever have an emergency where you need this? This seems ill conceived.
Again, the Volt already blazed this trail since 2011. The engine automatically comes on at least once every 6 weeks, and overall ensures that a single tank of gas doesn’t stay for more than ~6 months IIRC. I’ve never heard of any fuel-related engine problems on Volts.
Isn't it very old tech? Like WW1 tanks used this, no?
Toyota was right all along.
Toyota was right, but this is not hybrid. It's a range extender engine, won't be as efficient due to power conversions
Sounds like what Mazda did with the MX-30 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazda_MX-30) which flopped hard. They used their new Wankel engine as range extender, perfect use case since the power:weight ratio of these is impressive.
ITT: a disappointing number of low-effort drive-by comments responding to the headline alone.
It's 1) the WSJ and 2) a really dubious headline
I don't find it surprising or disappointing that ppl aren't bothering to go read the article because of the two factors in conjunction above
3) article is paywalled. Yeah, I know they can be bypassed, but it's yet more friction, not worth it for a really dubious headline.
Low effort? How about low effort screaming "buy Tesla or you are nazi" around 2016-2019?
Or when we tried to have a civilized discussion about low powered ICE engines, versus 2 ton luxury heavy battery cars?
The green crowd always mainly ran on low effort shit posts with state sponsoring. It is just laws of physics and politics did not really worked out as you imagined!
For me anyways, range isn’t the issue.
It’s charging facilities being down far too frequently, whereas gas stations are rarely bone dry.
It’s sites lying about charging port availability, leading to wasted range on red herrings (thanks for lying about NACS chargers, Sheetz!).
It’s the anxiety of not knowing whether a charging area will be safe to hang out in for half an hour, unlike a gas station where you can pump and run pretty quickly if necessary.
The anxiety doesn’t come from a “limited” range (especially when gas vehicles get comparable or worse ranges); it’s the experience surrounding charging itself that needs improvement. One series of service stations offering reliably available charging ports with both plug standards and offering clean bathrooms, hot food, and space to wait in, is what’s needed to soothe “range anxiety”.
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bwahhhaahhaaaa so to sell more of their old crappy ice they just change the narrative to "ice + e_car == e_car + ice" :D