(light music) (icons boinging) - So in a world of electric cars, in this video, we're gonna be taking a look at a $20,000 hybrid, a $120,000 hybrid, and a $2 million hybrid car. So this video is part an explainer, part a chance to drive some really sick cars. Shout out to Triple F Collection, we'll get there.
Anyway, unless you guys have been living under a rock, you've seen that electric cars have been having a bit of a renaissance lately, surging in popularity till the number one best sold new car on earth is electric, but they are still very much a new technology. Like they're obviously awesome with instant torque and no emissions and fast acceleration, but they have these huge, heavy batteries and they take forever to recharge and there's not enough infrastructure for everyone to own them, so there's this window now where it makes a lot of sense that maybe for most people, a hybrid is actually the best option. Interesting.
(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) So I don't think anyone's buying the Corolla for speed or power. I mean, if I'm being honest, it's actually still pretty zippy. So this car starts at $24,000 and it's a hybrid purely, purely for efficiency.
So the basics of this hybrid system, and many others in the same class, is that the wheels can be driven by the gas engine or the electric motor, or both. So this Corolla hybrid has a 1. 8 liter engine and one electric motor at the front axle that deliver a combined 138 horsepower and it's powering the electric motor with a pretty small 1.
6 kilowatt hour battery. So at low speeds, you've probably been in a car like this, the car goes totally electric, the gas engine turns off, but once you go over a certain speed, or use a certain amount of power, then it's gonna fire up the gas engine again and it couples it with the electric motor. Then anytime you're braking or coasting, that's when it charges the battery back up.
It's as you're slowing down, it captures some of that energy, so it never actually needs to be plugged in to charge up that small battery, and this system is good for literally 50 miles per gallon. When you drive this car, you literally have a game score, an eco score as you drive of if you can slow down and roll onto your accelerations better and roll to a stop more easily, you can gamify efficiency in this car to get your maximum miles per gallon. So it actually divides it up.
I have my eco zone, so I'm driving and if I get my little bar in the eco zone, I'm doing a good job. And then I have starts, cruises and stops. I've gotten my eco score pretty high, not to brag, but I've seen it in the 70s, which is pretty sick.
I don't know what happens when I get to 100, but what I do know is the better I get that score, the more miles per gallon I get. But yeah, pretty much everything about the rest of this car is designed around that efficiency. It's aerodynamic enough that it slips through the air.
It's got tires that have a low rolling resistance. It doesn't have these like sticky grippy tires. That's actually against efficiency, in this case.
So if you're looking for a reason why someone would buy a hybrid today, it's because they're not trying to charge a huge battery every night in their garage or rely on the grid or rely on finding public chargers. It's 'cause they just want better gas mileage and they wanna spend less, not zero, but less on gas today. (car dinging) But you already know, these cars are obviously very utility focused.
They're for people who just are going places, right? But what if you're more after the ultimate driving machine, something a little more versatile? Then you can spend a little more money and get something like this.
(beat music) All right, so this car starts at about $100,000, a little over, and this car is a hybrid for versatility. So the idea is this is a BMW 750e. There's a bunch of vehicles in this class, but yeah, you've spent enough money now at this point that you can reap the benefits of both gas and electric.
So this hybrid system has a bit more hardware to accomplish two different goals, so there's a three liter straight six engine making around 300 horsepower, and a medium sized 14. 4 kilowatt hour larger battery, powering a roughly 200 horsepower electric motor, so you're totaling around 500 horsepower. So once again, it can drive using both gas and electric, just like the Toyota, but now there's enough battery capacity that you can also drive fully electric at totally normal everyday driving speeds up to like 30 miles on a charge without ever turning on the gas engine, and then also, unlike the Corolla, this is a plug-in hybrid so you can directly plug the car into a wall to replenish the battery and just keep driving around on electric as long as you want to with zero gas use, so it does everything in the Toyota does, but more.
I do feel like plug-in hybrids at this moment in time are the one that make the most sense for the most people that I see driving 'em 'cause if you have a short commute, let's say you have a 10 mile commute every day and you just plug in at a charger at work or in your garage every night or during work in the daytime, you can just straight up never pay for gas again and drive it just like an electric car, but on the off chance you do need to drive further, go for a road trip, or just do something more than your normal 10 mile commute, you have all the benefits of a gas car. Thankfully these hybrids also have one crucial piece of the electric car, which is regenerative braking, which means it's gonna be able to recuperate a lot of the energy once I've gotten up to speed and start filling up the battery as I'm driving. So there's a little graph on the dash you can see here, which means as I accelerate and I take energy out of the battery, it goes up, but as I decelerate, it's actually blending and friction braking with regenerative braking, and if I drive around like this long enough, especially if I go down hills and break a lot, I will actually start adding to the charge of this battery too.
But you know how electric cars also have that party trick of instant torque available at any RPM and any speed? Well, the hybrid should benefit a little bit from that too. So because this motor is powerful enough and the battery is big enough to provide the voltage, yes, in the sportiest mode, this car also, when you floor it, gets that initial hit from the electricity and then follows with the surge of the rest of the power from the gas engine.
Oh, and one of the things I say a lot on the Auto Focus channel, or I've said before, is there are certain types of cars that are best to go electric, and because of how much batteries weigh, cars that are already heavy are the best ones to go electric. So like this is a big four-door luxury sedan. There is no attempt on making this a small car.
It's huge, it's got lots of space, it's soft, it's cushy. This is a great type of car to go electric, which is why the i7 is good, but yeah, there are lots of other versions of this. The RAV4 hybrid, the Toyota Prius Prime hybrid, all sorts of other plug-in hybrids.
Yeah, if I were to recommend one version for more people, like this, you still get all the nice plushy suspension and all of the tech in the car and all the screens and the way it drives, it's the same thing, but more accessible. You don't have to have a plug in your garage. So all that is fun.
That's, I get it. It's versatile. This is why they call it the ultimate driving machine, but you can always spend more.
You can always spend more. And when you do, you end up in the territory of specialists and this is definitely a specialist. Just give me a second.
(door whirring) Hold on a second, just wanna. . .
Okay. Now close that. (jazzy music) ♪ I've just got eyes for you ♪ ♪ No other could enchant me ♪ ♪ Darlin' like you do ♪ ♪ 'Cause I've just got eyes for you ♪ - So this car costs $2.
5 million and it's a hybrid purely for performance, which I mean, you could probably tell just by looking at it, but also by the fact that I'm sitting in the middle of the car now. I have to get used to this. This is the McLaren Speedtail.
So McLaren's done this a few times. One center driver's seat, two passenger seats, and just a whole lot of calibration for me for this insane driving position. But yeah, this thing is a hybrid.
It's technically a hybrid. So this hybrid system is pretty crazy. It's very focused on literally just going as fast as physically possible, which is just about maximizing power and minimizing weight.
So there's already a twin turbo four liter V8 engine pushing out 750 plus horsepower, but then they've also designed a special small, but super high-powered 1. 6 kilowatt hour battery that powers a single electric motor by itself that generates an extra 300 more horsepower. So the total is now over 1,000 horsepower and that motor is basically just being used to help spin the wheels even faster than the engine by itself could.
There is no electric-only mode. There is no situation where the gas engine ever shuts off. There are no efficiency goals here.
This is actually really similar to the turbocharged hybrid setups you literally see in Formula 1 today. It's just about going fast. So here's a couple of those hilariously over-engineered pieces of this car.
First of all, this is the only car I've ever actually driven that's shipped with cameras instead of side view mirrors, for even better aerodynamics, of course. They've also got the electrochromic glass roof tint and windshield tint instead of moving fabric pieces. But then also, the active arrow on the back of this car is not just like regular pivoting parts or spoilers or anything like that, but it's literally bending the carbon fiber body work, and all of the paint and coatings with it up and down when you're under braking to assist with slowing down.
That's insane if you can see what's happening here. And this is also the only car I've ever seen with a wireless charger. That's right, the McLaren Speedtail wireless charges, so the battery is at the bottom of the car and it's small enough that if the driver doesn't park exactly over the right spot in their garage, it's not a huge deal because, again, it's a small battery, it shouldn't take too long and inductive charging has never been particularly efficient, but it'll eventually work.
And no, I don't think that this would fly for any fully electric car today. Everything about the outside of this car is designed, it's sculpted to just cut through the air and that's how it does zero to 186 miles an hour faster than a Bugatti Chiron, and 250 miles an hour in a straight line. Now, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret about these super, super fast electric cars.
They need a huge battery to realistically make that happen, right? Let's take Tesla Model S Plaid, for example. 1,000 horsepower, crazy high power output from the battery, but in order to do that, they need to give it this huge 100 kilowatt hour battery so that when you export all that power, you don't just drain the battery super quickly, you can keep driving like a normal person.
So that's why you have these super high horsepower electric cars, but they always come with the sacrifice of weight. They're always heavy. The Lucid Air, it's fighting its weight.
The EV6 GT, it's fighting how heavy it is. With a supercar like this, it's not fully electric all the time and so they're willing to put in a tiny battery that exports a ton of power and basically drains it in seconds. So I'm gonna show you something with this real quick.
Right now I have 100% of my battery. I'm gonna do just a quick little pull and see just what a couple of seconds of electric-assisted acceleration will do. (engine revving) Way down to 74% battery, just from that little acceleration, 100 to 74, and now it's already, it's going right back up to 100.
It's almost 100 again because I'm driving and recuperating that energy and now it's 100. This is super high-tech stuff and it actually has a lot of parallels to what we see in Formula 1. Believe it or not, those Formula 1 cars that we're watching on TV today, those are small turbocharged hybrid powertrains.
I kind of wanna do that again. (engine revving) That's what the F1 cars are doing out there. They are recovering energy as they break, and they are spending energy when they accelerate.
And I guess that's the difference between this and the Rimac Nevera. You remember, you probably have seen the video I did with the quickest electric car in the world, the Rimac Nevera, which yes, does have a big heavy battery. It weighs like 5,000 pounds like a Model S.
The crazy thing about that car, and that's an anomaly, is that it has four electric motors, which you can kind of think of as being treated like gears, but not really. This will have a higher top speed simply because it just keeps gearing up, seven speed gearbox, and it pulls all the way through up to 250 miles an hour. If you want a hybrid supercar, you can kind of have both fast and quick in the same car.
This is fast and quick. I mean, it's not razor sharp, fully electric quick, but it's close and it's, yeah, it's the fastest, it's one of the fastest cars you can possibly build. Yeah, so I guess my point here with the whole video is, yes, I still fully believe electrification is the future at every level of cars, but in the meantime, it's pretty clear that hybrids make a lot of sense and they've been right under our noses the whole time.
That's about it. I got your driver's speed deal.
