If that were possible KIA would offer it. Their cheapest car is close to $20K.
There are PHEVs that use an eCVT to do what you describe, most don't because the drive feel is kinda shit.
There's no reason it has to drive like garbage, just scale up the electric motors, like Tesla does. Electric cars are actually far more capable of being sporty and awesome than ICE, electric motors pack a tonne of punch into a very small volume, and you get four of them instead of just one connected through a transmission. Not only is a combustion engine slower to react to throttle in the first place, it will waste a lot of its output just making heat, noise, and spinning a transmission around. The thermodynamic efficiency of a petrol engine is around 25%, diesels can get up to twice that in the case of trains/boats, but in cars you generally shouldn't expect more than 30%. Electric motors can go as high as 95%. Case in point all the new record-setting supercars are electric drive, I can promise you environmentalism is very low on the priority list for those, they only chase performance.There are PHEVs that use an eCVT to do what you describe, most don't because the drive feel is kinda shit.
Also the RAM electric truck, which has impressively bad range in all electric, has a completely disconnected V6 serving as a generator:
You may be really missing the value in driving a car where it feels like you are connected to what is happening.
Yeh the picanto, driven it. Its a little underpowered and the engine has that small engine feel to it but it was pretty smooth. Still has all the modern dash and screen inside it. It may not be possible to build a car anymore without all the extra stuff thanks to regulations
Hot dip galvanization certainly fixed the rusting frame issue and yeh you would probably can't get a car over the line without the very expensive frame. This was my point though, so many regulations means you don't get ultra cheap cars anymore. Is there a $15K car anywhere anymore?
Mitsubishi Mirage is pretty close, $16,695 base.
DOn't klnow if it's available in the US, but the Dacia Sandero starts at around 11k USD equivalent. It's as basic as you can get a car. Reviews tend to knock it back because it has a poor Euro NCAP rating, but its low score comes from the fact that it has essentially none of the "safety assist" features that plague modern cars.
They'd be faster without the hybrid system. The $200k gas Corvette ZR1 is going to trounce the $600k hybrid Ferrari SF90 and the $2.2 million electric Rimac Nevera on the Nürburgring because it has its 1000 HP all the time (unlike the Ferrari) and doesn't weigh as much as a full-size SUV (like the Rimac).
In my way too expensive country the Kia Picanto GT is $14,500.
oh fuck you can still get Suzuki Swifts? they stopped making them here because efficiency regulations made everyone buy big and heavy cars
I swear, EV fires must be the "thing that never happens happened again" of the EV world.
Automatic fire suppression systems will never work on lithium batteries. They're self-oxidizing, meaning you'd have to disassemble the thing and separate the components to put it out. What you do is just pull it outside so it can burn itself out, or dump lots of sand on it. It'll still burn under the sand, just it won't be able to set fire to anything else.
Inb4 people buy the more expensive trims, then Tesla tanks the value so you lose money.
I hate all of these "safety" features that take control of the vehicle away from the driver. Not only are they literally killing people, but they're making drivers less attentive, by teaching them to rely on the car to save them instead of actively controlling it.
Lane assist is also really bad at keeping a racing line through curves, even if you compare it to a human limiting herself to a single lane (as one would in a curve with limited visibility or while meeting another vehicle). I get that it sounds like an insane complaint, but I have reason to be bothered. It’s less economical, because it forces you to brake and then accelerate whenever you encounter a curve, and even with the reduction in speed, the hard turns it makes are terribly uncomfortable for the people in the vehicle.
And it's also fucking dangerous. B-Roads may not be in the best of condition, and if on an open curve with good visibility I decide to take a lane through a corner that's avoiding a pothole, or indent, I don't want the car jerking me back. Lane assist outside of motorway driving is evil.
