The key point of EREV is that it runs like an EV, entirely off the battery, until the battery runs out, then it uses the gasoline generator to keep the battery charged at some minimal level.
However, there were several plug-in hybrids that couldn't really function as pure EVs, or had abysmal range. IIRC: Ford Fusion Energi with ~13 mi of range, or 2013 PHEV Prius, several luxury SUVs and sports cars (BMW i9?)
And the non-interoperable app bullshit with chargers. ChargePoint, Blink, EVgo, whatever else requires me to make an account, deposit some minimum amount of money (that just sits there afterwards), and only then charge, if the app or the charger works. (E.g: ChargePoint had chargers that can be used with their RFID card but not through the app)
Let me swipe my credit card. It's what it's for.
It's ironic that the article gives the perfect argument against itself:
In the US, nearly all driving trips are less than 50 miles
Which means that EREVs are, in fact, used as electric vehicles for "nearly all driving trips".
It's as if the article is ignoring that EREVs run off the battery first and have a (fairly efficient) gas generator as backup. Plus China-blaming, plus saying "the Ukraine" (by now, you should know better).
Bolt ≠ Volt
Volt is a plug-in series hybrid (EREV), Bolt is full EV. Volt stopped being manufactured in 2019.
Now you have Prius Prime. Same idea and EV range as a Chevy Volt from... 2011.
Tried it out a while ago, and found that I prefer GNOME's UX and configurable shortcuts better, and that two side-by-side applications on my laptop is the most "tiles" I would realistically want.
The cars were advertised as reliably getting 80 miles (130 km) between battery recharging, although in one test a Detroit Electric ran 211.3 miles (340.1 km) on a single charge. Top speed was only about 20 mph (32 km/h), but this was considered adequate for driving within city or town limits at the time.
From Wikipedia
I tried out postmarketOS + phosh on a PinePhone about a year ago. For my own needs, it worked fairly well, except (ironically) receiving calls. It was like driving an old car, everything was slightly jank, but worked, and could be tinkered with - see the entire review. I have to give credit that there has been impressive progress in mobile Linux since PinePhone's release in 2019, and a lot of it was developed by unpaid hobbyists.
Other than with language models, this has already happened: Take a look at apps such as Merlin Bird ID (identifies birds fairly well by sound and somewhat okay visually), WhoBird (identifies birds by sound, ) Seek (visually identifies plants, fungi, insects, and animals). All of them work offline. IMO these are much better uses of ML than spammer-friendly text generation.
Another FYI: Ubuntu Touch does not support VoLTE at all, thus it might be more difficult to use it in some networks and countries (for example, USA shut down 3G some years ago)
However, I was pleasantly surprised by the responsive UI, the browser, and Cinny (the Matrix Client)
Here are a few other interesting green automotive startups that didn't make it:
Proxies started getting blocked (by some auth-account methods) last year, but libreddit/redlib dev was able to outsmart them multiple times. Now it seems like reddit is blocking IPs (and/or IP ranges). Running redlib from a residential IP still works, but I would not expect it to work from a VPS.