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!
Imagine the fund were distributing to several teams, but let's say Z.ai and Deepseek were european and among them. What percentage would be allocated to Mistral in that case? OK, the other two aren't, but in the same vein, should the EU fund be saving its powder until such a project shows up?
Julia also has some of the nicest GPU abstraction frameworks of any language, achieving pretty low friction portability over a decent subset of CUDA, Metal, ROCm and CPU. KernelAbstractions.jl, AcceleratedKernels.jl etc.
You have no choice really if you’re a UK business, there is no UK (or French, or German, or Japanese for that matter) cloud that can do what AWS or GCP does
Really? None other than Airbus chose Scaleway (a personal favourite) for their migration of core services off AWS. There's also Hetzner, OVH, NetCUPs etc. I'd agree they're not AWS/GCP scale (yet) but as more big names move for reasons of EU sovereignty that multiplies available capital and soon they become hyperscale themselves. And sovereign.
My understanding is OVH and Hetzner were traditionally more bare metal/VPS orientated (though maybe that's changed)?
Fair though, I hadn't even heard of Scaleway, and that does look a lot more like a direct AWS/GCP alternative. Maybe because I'm UK based that's why I never hear of the EU clouds
This point cannot be overstated - famously the Torygraph for its stance should always have been treated with a degree of scepticism under former editors but such journalistic standards it ever had are now long and completely defunct. A rubbish-laden agitprop comic.
