Are You Kidding Me? -- October 12, 2019

Quick! What does PHEV stand for?

I know the "H" is hybrid.

And "EV" is well, EV -- electric vehicle.

But I forget, what does the "P" stand for?

Honda, Mitsubishi, Volvo, others have PHEVs.

Oh, there it is -- "plug-in" -- I completely forgot. LOL.

Okay, there you have it.

But are you kidding? In this weekend's "Off Duty" section of The WSJ, the automobile guy has a full page article on the Range Rover's Hybrid SUV.

Price: $69,500 to $114,500.

Range? I quote in full from the article:

The PHEV's problem is the technical overhead relative to its delivered performance. At the absolute best, fully charged, the Sport P400e can squeeze maybe 25 miles of all-electric from its 13.1kW/h battery -- though I never saw close to that in my time in the car. Even in the first few miles of low-to-moderate speed urban driving -- like I'm on my way to a funeral in Eco mode -- the little turbo four (fossil fuel) engine would [take over]. Dang. That was a short virtuous spiral. 

Are you kidding me? $75,000 for a PHEV that has an electric range that barely gets 25 miles?

By the way, to compare, for NASA's Apollo missions to land men on the moon, the lunar excursion module's battery:

• 65 kW-hr at 4 kW max for a 35-hr lunar stay

This battery brought the Apollo 13 astronauts safely back home over the course of four days and some 500,000 miles.