Last week Motor Trend wrote the article “Plug-In Hybrids? Just Say Hell No,” with a subheading that read “EVs have progressed. It’s time to ditch the training wheels.” I’m a fan of the author, Johnny Lieberman, but I have to call his “take” what it is: a steaming hot pile of manure.
I’ve already described in detail why PHEVs are valuable to American consumers and to the climate at large—these assertions are not refutable, they are simply fact. Still, Lieberman and many other journalists keep writing the same things: that EVs are so good these days that we should just get rid of PHEVs, and that not every PHEV owner plugs in all the time, anyway. Those are pretty much the main arguments against PHEVs, and they’re just ridiculous.
These authors’ “all or nothing” stances towards EVs are detrimental to our planet and they don’t help the consumer. I will not stand for it.
The Basic Premise: Getting More People Into Electric Cars Is A Net Societal Good
Let’s start with a basic premise: The best thing for the environment is to, as quickly as possible, get as many people driving electric as possible.
That’s a fair premise, right? Obviously, there are infrastructure saturation concerns, but by and large, the premise seems sound. Climate change is about cumulative emissions, so time matters. We need to get folks out of their guzzlers and zipping around on grid power ASAP. Then we gotta clean that grid up more and more (aka decarbonize the grid).
Then… Why Aren’t More People Buying EVs?
OK, so the premise is established. Now let’s take the next logical step from that premise: We have to determine why everyone can’t drive an EV immediately. Let’s, for the sake of simplicity, talk about those in the market for a new car. Why is it that over 80 percent of all vehicle sales are still traditional gas cars? For us to meet the goal established by our premise, we need to get those folks driving electric now! What’s happening? Let’s figure out the possible problems.
To simplify this, let’s just put the problems in terms of supply and demand. If every new car buyer wanted to drive an EV, and there was plenty of EV supply/variety at a good price, then our problem would be solved. And yet, less than 10 percent of new cars in the United States are EVs. So something is happening on the supply or demand side — which is it? The answer is: Both.
There are lots of reasons why not all car sales are EVs right now, including supply constraints, EV skepticism (including concerns about EV longevity/range/infrastructure/depreciation), and cost. Many of these, as the anti-PHEV article by MotorTrend correctly points out, may go away in time, with EVs dropping in cost year by year, infrastructure building up, and folks becoming better-versed on how EVs work. But, as I established earlier, climate change is a cumulative emissions issue. In 2024, we have lots of people looking to buy a new car they can drive for the next five or 10 years; they could choose an EV, but at least 90% of them do not.
The result? They keep driving gas cars, harming the environment.
This is a choice automakers have made, and it’s a choice that lots of anti-PHEV folks apparently want consumers to continue to make: “Buy an EV or keep driving gas guzzlers.” It’s the “All or Nothing” approach to electric vehicles and it’s doing significant harm to the environment.
Let’s Imagine A Customer Who Wants A Truck That Can Tow
Take example-customer Joey. Joey wants to buy a pickup truck to replace his 1997 Chevy Silverado, a V8 workhorse that has seen one too many Michigan winters and has succumbed to rust. He shops around and finds a Ford F-150 Lightning. “Oh wow, that’s a nice truck,” he says. “But damn, that’s not cheap. Worse, the thing can only tow a trailer 100 miles before needing a long recharge.
Joey passes. He looks at the Rivian R1T; it has the same issues. He checks out the Cybertruck — well, damn, it’s expensive and can’t tow far, either! Finally, he visits a Chevy dealership and sees the Silverado EV — it can tow his trailer for 200 miles! Awesome!
Except the reason it can tow a trailer 200 miles is that Chevy shoved a humongous 200+ kWh battery pack into it — a heavy, expensive, dirty-to-manufacture battery. “Yeah, that’s too expensive, I’m out,” says Joey. So Joey runs to his local Ford dealer and picks up an F-150 hybrid, which gets only 24 MPG combined. Joey continues to spew emissions into the air from his ICE pickup for the next 10 years.
Now let’s look at an alternative. Let’s say Joey waits a few months for the Ram Ramcharger to hit the market. The Ramcharger is a plug-in hybrid, though more specifically, you can call it an extended-range EV, or EREV. Joey checks it out. It can tow lots of weight, it has ridiculous range since the gasoline engine acts as a generator once the battery is depleted, it has a smaller battery that’s lighter and cleaner and cheaper to manufacture than that of an EV truck with the same range, and Joey can drive it in electric mode 95% of the miles he drives, since he really doesn’t tow that often.
So Joey turns in his gas guzzler today, and instead of driving a 24 MPG F-150 hybrid (or a 21 MPG Ram non-hybrid or his patched-up old 15 MPG Chevy V8) for the next decade, he spends 95% of his miles driving his Ramcharger in EV mode, only using the range extender when towing once every couple of years. The environment benefits. (Note: The Ram Ramcharger is expected to cost about as much as the Ram REV fully-electric truck, but per my conversation with experts at Munro & Associates, range-extended EVs can be cheaper to build than EVs since their batteries are so much smaller. The MotorTrend piece also notes that PHEVs tend to be cheaper than EVs).
Car Buying Is Not Rational
This “all or nothing” attitude is ridiculous and ignores human psychology. People are not rational actors, which is one reason why PHEVs are so important. Also, PHEVs CAN be cleaner than BEVs.
No disrespect to Motor Trend, of course. But read this:https://t.co/eDu54w0XSI https://t.co/k9qRuD5Irm
— David Tracy (@davidntracy) May 26, 2024
PHEV detractors will retort with these two non-points:
1. If this fake “Joey” person only tows once every couple of years, then he should just buy an EV and not a PHEV. He’s barely even towing!
2. What if he doesn’t charge and just uses the gas engine all the time?
These are the two main arguments against PHEVs, but they both fall flat under scrutiny.
First, when it comes to purchasing decisions, it’s really not that relevant what consumers actually do with their vehicles, it’s about what they think they can do. It’s why sports car buyers buy sports cars — not because they race them all the time, but because they could if they wanted to. It’s the same reason why people buy Jeep Wranglers — not because those customers off-road all the time, but because they could. It’s the same thing with trucks; people buy them not because they tow or haul that often, but because they could. It’s a vehicle’s capability — its potential — that creates its image, and it’s that image that consumers buy into. It’s been that way since the beginning of cars, and it’s never going to change.
To Lieberman’s credit, he acknowledges this:
Another argument is that a PHEV is perfect for running around town and then when it’s time for a road trip you have a gasoline vehicle. I absolutely get this part, especially psychologically. Lord knows, I’ve spent my fair share of time screaming into a phone about a slow/broken charger. But charging is improving.
But “charging is improving” isn’t enough of a counterpoint when less than 10% of new car sales are EVs. Are we just going to wait for infrastructure to improve as millions of Americans spew emissions from their tailpipes? Or are we going to give those Americans more options to drive electric today? Obviously, the second one is the answer, and we can make that happen by offering more PHEVs.
‘But Not Every PHEV Owner Charges’
The second point that many anti-PHEV folks make is about PHEV owners not actually charging their vehicles. ‘PHEVs are less efficient than gas counterparts when they’re not charged, and not all PHEV owners charge, so PHEVs are bad’ is the crux of the argument.
This I don’t entirely understand, either. First, if it’s inconvenient for these folks to charge, then how do we expect to sell them EVs, which require charging? More importantly, there’s not amazing data out there on what the “electric drive share” (i.e. how much of a vehicle’s driven mileage is done in electric-only mode) of a typical PHEV is today. Chevy famously said that over 65 percent of a Volt’s drive time (not miles) is done in electric mode:
And according to The Detroit Free Press, the best-selling PHEV in the U.S., the Jeep Wrangler 4Xe, is seeing plenty of charging. From the news site:
…Jeep owners are enthusiastic about EV mode. A whopping 90% of 4xe owners charge their vehicles an average of five times a week, Jeep North America boss Jim Morrison told me.
“A lot of our customers go days at a time without breaking into gasoline power,” Morrison said. “It’s something our customers want to do. They love the 4xe because it’s a really good Jeep. It’s fun to drive and quiet.”
Jeep collected data from 50,000 4xe owners who agreed to have their charging and driving behavior monitored anonymously.
The charging rate is even more impressive because the 4xe’s electric range is considerably below what the Strong Plug-in Hybrid Coalition considers necessary to encourage regular charging.
Remember that last line about electric range being too low to encourage charging, because I’ll get back to it in a second. For now, I’ll paste a bit more data from that Detroit Free Press article:
Kia sells a trio of plug-in hybrid small SUVs: the Niro, Sorento and Sportage. Assembled outside North America, they are not eligible for federal tax credits, but their charging rates are encouraging.
Owners of all three report frequently plugging in to charge daily or nightly:
◾ Niro: 70%
◾ Sorento: 80%
◾ Sportage: 62%
Obviously, that Kia study is fairly weak, and there are studies out there that say charging rates on PHEVs are too low — studies like this one from the International Council On Clean Transportation. But even that study says it could benefit from additional data.
So the data is murky, but that doesn’t matter because not every owner has to plug in all the time for PHEVs to make sense. If only a third of truck drivers plug in daily and drive 95 percent of their miles in EV mode instead of spewing emissions from a 21 MPG (or lower) truck, that’s going to be a significant win for the environment. And to be honest, I bet the figure would be above a third for pickup trucks, since driving them on gas leads to such a significant added cost for the driver.
What’s more, it’s not a given that all PHEVs have to be less efficient than equivalent gas cars when they’re not charged. A range-extended EV running on its gas engine could, in theory, be more efficient than an equivalent ICE vehicle since the engine is able to run at a steady RPM to act as a generator.
And that leads me to a significant issue with these anti-PHEV assertions: They assume that all PHEVs must be like the ones currently available. Just because modern PHEVs aren’t good enough (as I wrote in a previous story) doesn’t mean future PHEVs can’t be different.
PHEVs Can Be So Much Better Than The Current Ones Out There Now
I mentioned a few paragraphs up that you should remember that line in the Detroit Free Press article about PHEVs’ electric ranges being too low to encourage charging. Here’s more from that piece:
“Longer-range PHEVs get plugged in very, very regularly,” said coalition co-chair and Colorado State University engineering professor Tom Bradley. “Even PHEVs that are only charged at work or every other day are still effective” at reducing emissions.
There are many potential policy tools available to increase the electric drive share of PHEVs. EPA could consider the following measures:
» Adjust the regulatory charge-depleting drive share (utility factor) downwards for PHEVs to reflect current real-world performance.
» Require in-use data reporting for specific PHEV models to receive a higher utility factor reflective of said in-use data.
» Adopt minimum electric driving range requirements, similar to California’s range requirements for zero-emission vehicle crediting in its Advanced Clean Cars II regulation.
» Adopt other vehicle model-level technical requirements such as minimum all electric power, maximum fuel tank size, fast-charging capability, and minimum cold weather performance.
» Establish a higher utility factor corresponding to demonstrated purchase of PHEV by drivers with home chargers or proof of manufacturer-provided charging access assistance. Meanwhile, manufacturers could incentivize regular charging by assisting in home charger installation and by actively reporting cost of driving to users. Tax administrators can incentivize PHEV purchases by offering purchase or tax credits for PHEVs whose in-use data show high utility factor.
This all aligns with my aforementioned article about how modern PHEVs just aren’t good enough. Here’s a quote from my piece:
let’s have a look at the pure-EV range figures of some of America’s most popular plug-in hybrids:
- Jeep Wrangler 4xe: 22 miles
- Ford Escape plug-in: 37 miles
- Chrysler Pacifica PHEV: 32 miles
- Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe: 26 miles
- Hyundai Tucson PHEV: 33 miles
- Hyundai Santa Fe PHEV: 31 miles
- BMW X5 xDrive45e: 31 miles
- BMW 330e: 23 miles
- Toyota Prius Prime: 44 miles
- Lexus RX450H+: 37 miles
These numbers are pathetic.
Many of these cars don’t even have enough range to get the average American to work and back without recharging, and even if you can plug in these low-range PHEVs at work, plenty of Americans will still not be able to do a full home-work-home commute.
[…]
Seriously, if the government’s goal is what they say it is — to get folks driving electric — then we need higher-range PHEVs, ideally relatively-simple, range-extended models that are clearly EVs first, gas cars second. If we can get reasonably-priced, 70-ish-mile PHEVs out there, I bet we’d see a lot more folks driving electric sooner than we think.
Today, we have far too many low-range, half-baked PHEVs out there, and far too few high-range range-extended EVs (which count as PHEVs). Plus, we have zero plug-in hybrid pickup trucks — vehicles that, more than most, would incentivize charging given how much gas they’d use when the ICE was on. If we had a larger variety of range-extended PHEVs with decent, 70+ mile EV-only range, there’s no question that they’d get plugged in far more than the current crop of PHEVs, especially if we adopt “vehicle model-level technical requirements” that the ICCT mentions above like maximum fuel tank size and minimum electric power.
We need the PHEVs to feel like EVs first, and gas cars second. Modern PHEVs feel like the opposite.
Let’s Stop With The Anti-PHEV Slander, Because The Value Of PHEVs Is Irrefutable
What exactly has led Lieberman and so many other car journalists to write these anti-PHEV articles? I think maybe they’re getting caught up a bit in all the EV excitement, but more than anything, I think their view of PHEVs does not span beyond the current crop of offerings. Modern PHEVs kinda suck, especially relative to what they could be, and if you drive a vehicle with only a 30-mile EV range, and listen to the engine cut on before you make it home from work, you’re naturally going to think what Lieberman thought:
A charged Prius Prime is smooth and silent and torquey; it does indeed offer most of the inherent good benefits of EV driving. Until the battery runs dry. Then the weak, coarse 2.0-liter Atkinson-cycle inline-four fires up and routes its power through a continuously variable transmission. Not exactly my idea of a good time. The whole driving experience gets worse. I kept thinking, Man, why not just plop a larger battery into the Prime and turn it into a damn fine EV?
I’m going to respond to that rhetorical question at the end of that quote: Because not everyone wants an EV, and what’s more, an automaker can make two or three PHEVs using the battery resources from a single BEV. If the Prius Lieberman was driving offered a decent EV range of, say, 75 or 80 miles, he’d rarely ever hear that anemic gas motor cut on, he’d be driving a car more palatable to the masses, and he’d possibly be driving a car even better for the environment than a full-EV since the battery is much smaller (depending upon how often he uses the range extender).
Before I conclude, allow me to address a few specific quotes in the Motor Trend piece:
A dead PHEV battery means you’re needlessly dragging a heavy EV drivetrain around town with you…With a PHEV, you get added tire wear to go along with all that.
Um, with an EV, you’re carrying around 1000 pounds of extra weight every day as you commute to and from work. The weight of a gas engine and cooling system doesn’t even compare.
But let’s say you dutifully charge your PHEV before you drive it. You’re being trained to use an EV in the worst way. Fully charging a battery to 100 percent and then running it down to zero is terrible for the long-term health of any battery.
This assumes PHEVs only have just enough range for an average commute. Current ones do, so I’ll give you that. But some PHEVs, like my 2021 BMW i3S, offer 130 miles of range, so I have to recharge once every four days, and I don’t have to top it up to 100%. So that charging assumption isn’t fair, though yes, you’d have to charge it more than you’d charge an EV. (Note: I owned a small-battery PHEV that needed its battery replaced, but that was an early battery on BMW’s earliest EV; later updated models have batteries that last extremely long, rendering the point about battery degradation moot).
I’m aware pro-PHEV individuals will argue the local infrastructure where they live doesn’t support owning a fully electric vehicle. My counter: If you’re charging your PHEV at home, why not charge an EV at home?
I don’t get it? Why not just keep the PHEV and charge it at home? Why is charging an EV at home better than charging a PHEV at home? I’m a bit lost on this point. Especially if you only use it as a short-range commuter, why would you want a humongous battery that you never use?
Another pro-PHEV argument is that on average, they’re cheaper to buy. Also a fair point, for now. Lower-priced EVs are coming, but in the meantime, have you checked out how little used EVs cost?
Sure, but if I’m buying new, those crazy EV depreciation rates would scare me off a bit. (To be sure: PHEV depreciation is a bit lower based on what I’ve read, but it’s not great).
Why have two propulsion systems when one works just fine? It’s a dead technology, anyway, as several countries and 12 U.S. states will be banning the sale of new internal combustion vehicles in coming years.
Why have two? Because 1. You can build 2-3 PHEVs with the battery resources from one EV. 2. PHEVs are cheaper than EVs 3. PHEVs are lighter than EVs 4. PHEVs can be better for the environment than EVs 5. EV skepticism is real 6. Infrastructure concerns
And I could go on and on. (Though technically it’s not two propulsion systems, since a range-extended EV just charges the battery, which drives the car via the electric motor. Added maintenance is minimal; change the oil every couple of years, maybe swap an air filter, that’s about it). The reality is that the automaker with the biggest decrease in carbon emissions last year was Toyota, and the company did that not by offering EVs, but by offering hybrids. Additionally, the ICCT — the organization that wrote the study criticizing PHEV charging rates — states emphatically that PHEVs can be major players in reducing climate change:
Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) have the potential to reduce emissions from light-duty vehicles and help ease the transition to fully electric, zero tailpipe-emission vehicles. Though PHEVs store less energy in their battery packs than fully electric vehicles, PHEVs can be designed with enough energy storage to cover most daily trips in the United States. As long as such vehicles begin with a full, or nearly full charge every day, they have the capacity to significantly reduce fossil fuel consumption.
PHEVs value to the environment is irrefutable.
I’m not saying that the U.S. shouldn’t still push EVs, because people who absolutely need charging infrastructure to get around will help push that infrastructure to improve more than folks who have a gas range extender backup onboard — pain points yield growth. Nor am I saying there aren’t major issues with PHEVs. They don’t have enough range, for one, and their emissions output isn’t easily predictable.
This latter point is worth reiterating, because it should not be understated how important accountability is to overall emissions reduction, and thus climate change mitigation. And that’s a challenge right now, because automakers are awarded by the EPA when they sell clean cars, and they’re punished when they sell dirty cars. If the EPA is rewarding automakers for selling PHEVs under the assumption that those PHEVs get charged the vast majority of the time, and those cars rarely get charged, then the automaker is reaping rewards without actually benefiting the environment. This is an important challenge for us to tackle, but it’s 2024, and this can be solved easily, and things are happening on that front. The ICCT breaks it down:
The upshot is that EPA had been giving automakers too much credit for greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions from the PHEVs they sold. EPA counts electric vehicles as zero-carbon in its vehicle regulations, and PHEVs as partially-zero carbon, based on their assumed electric drive share. In effect, EPA was undercounting the GHG emissions from the higher-than-expected gas guzzling of PHEVs.
EPA is addressing that problem now by lowering their assumed PHEV electric drive share. The figure below shows EPA’s previously assumed drive share in blue and their proposed revision to that curve in red. EPA’s proposed new curve is almost exactly the same as the one in our 2022 study, shown in green, which we derived from user-reported data in the Fuelly app. As a result, EPA’s estimates have moved closer to real-world usage. For example, a PHEV with a 35-mile electric range will be labeled as 45% zero-carbon instead of 57%.
The ICCT recommends the EPA drop that electric drive share further, and it even suggests in the previously-mentioned study that the EPA “Require in-use data reporting for specific PHEV models to receive a higher utility factor reflective of said in-use data.”
So yes, the GHG credits side of things still needs work, but it’s something that can be solved, and it certainly does not detract from the (once again) irrefutable fact that offering PHEVs is good for the climate. It’s not up for debate anymore. Please, stop writing articles about how EVs are so good and not all PHEV drivers plug in, so therefore PHEVs should go away. Those points are weak.
You can get more people driving EV daily by offering PHEVs, which are cheaper, lighter, more palatable to EV skeptics, not as resource-intensive to build, and immune to infrastructure issues. And as the infrastructure improves, PHEV buyers will just plug in more frequently.
Let’s move on.
It’s a mistake to compare a single EV with a single PHEV. If three or more PHEVs can be made for the same battery materials as one EV, that’s your proper comparison. Those three PHEVs, together, will be driven more and will save more gas than one EV. Remember that the average car is driven one hour a day, so it sits parked 95% of its life. That’s a waste of battery materials, unless we reach a point where EVs commonly act as home batteries for renewable energy production.
I disagree that PHEVs need larger batteries. That makes them heavier and more expensive, and for what? Bragging rights? In my seven years’ experience driving a PHEV, the big savings have come by doing every short local shopping trip in EV mode. Watch the instant fuel mileage display in your regular ICE vehicle. That will show you that a cold engine guzzles gas, using a rich mixture to warm up the catalytic converter. My ICE car might get 16 mpg on such a brief drive, but it can score 28-30 on a long trip.
Here’s the PHEV difference, considering two Ford hybrids I’ve owned: 38 mpg for the hybrid, and 65 mpg for the otherwise identical PHEV. The EPA tests indicated a 2 mpg difference, but that was a brief test. Auto reviewer who borrow a car for a few days and drive intensively will never see that kind of savings. You have to live with the car for a while, which they never do. So pro auto writers may know less about PHEVs than regular owners.
Not mentioned here,
If you live in an area where the grid can be unpredictable, a range-extended EV (PHEV) can double as a home backup generator via bi-directional charging.
So you have less cost/environmental cost to build, less emissions from commuting, and a built-in home backup as our grid sees load changes and demands over time.
Add some solar panels in there and DAMN, you’ve made one hell of a setup that barely ever uses dino juice.
Though I heartily agree with you, this article is just too long. It needs more editing and less repetition.
I couldn’t finish it. Sorry, David! I’ll go back and read the rest later.
Do go back and read it in its entirety. It’s long for a reason: It’s a complex issue, and being thorough is the only way to convince folks who live in internet echochambers.
I’m planning too! And, for what it’s worth, the wife and I just bought a Hyundai Tucson (regular) hybrid. She loves it so far! I rarely get to drive it, so I haven’t formed an opinion yet!
Jonny Lieberman takes all of the complaints against BEVs and applies them to PHEVs without a hint of irony or self awareness. It’s just a maddening case of “why are you making it so hard for me to be on your side!”
If our goal is to reduce emissions, we should work to maximize the percentage of miles driven on electric power and minimize the resources used to do so. A PHEV with a 40-50 mile electric range is the best way to do this for most people. It has enough range that the average person will almost never use gas. It weighs less and uses far fewer resources to manufacture than a BEV. It won’t require an L2 charger, so home-charging is far more accessible. And by the time BEV tech and charging infrastructure has caught up (say, 20ish years), those PHEVs will be naturally replaced through attrition.
But so many BEV-stans (I consider myself a big supporter of BEVs, but I’m also a realist) just can’t stand the idea of an intermediary step. They (rightly) see BEVs are the future, but they’ve built their worldview around this in such a way that they can’t handle any criticism and see anything that highlights a drawback or shortcoming as an attack.
Jonny is always about his hyperbolic hot takes, it’s the only thing I really find annoying about him. Making every new vehicle on the road a hybrid would do the most good on a macro scale and we should be transitioning towards PHEV as battery production ramps up.
If memory serves 1 BEV battery = 6 PHEV batteries = 24-30 HEV batteries and 30 cars burning 30% less fuel is better than 1 car burning none.
Did I miss where you talk about price delta’s? Up Front cost, complexity of drive train potentially increasing repair costs over time and then the biggest concern most have is secondary market value. Can you trade it in and not take as large a hit? Will I buy a used PHEV aka Hybrid vehicle when the ones that have been around for 2 decades are often overlooked because the battery is unable to hold much of any charge any more.
Spot on. We need this to be an actual transition process, not a change that will happen with a finger snap. The push towards full electrification seems more and more like a push towards pricing the working and lower-middle class out of car ownership – It’s already happening, with automakers discontinuing all cheap cars, causing prices in the used car market to go up. Hybrids are a good stopgap measure in this transition to alleviate the socio-economic effects of full electrification, while allowing more time for the renewable energy infrasctructure to develp and making the extra load to the current infrastructure more manageable.
I do understand the need to reduce emissions, and I’m 100% for it, but at this point we should really be doing more about manufacturing/agricultural/power generation emissions, instead of putting the whole burden on car ownership. Private vehicles account for 48% of all transportation related emissions, maybe it’s time to start tackling the other 52% in Transportation alone. And when we do, we’ll only have tackled 1/5 of global CO2 emissions. Put into perspective, personal transportation accounts for less than 1/10 of global emissions; feels like the push for EVs is tied more to profits than meaningful reduction of emissions, and the fact that the industry seems to be trying to skip a stage in the transition is even more indicative of that, in my opinion.
Believing that buying a particular new car will solve all our problems – isn’t that the most American thing ever?
Yeah true. But as a Restoftheworldian I feel compelled to point out the flaws in that line of thought. Catastrophic events brought on by climate change don’t really care for imaginary lines.
I worry more about climate change than you might imagine. I have a signed first edition of Al Gore’s book to prove it. My personal belief is that there are better ways to use battery materials to decarbonize besides private vehicles, which on average, are parked 23 hours of each day. My point is that Americans are especially on board with any old reason to want a new car.
I understood what you meant, and I fully agree. My original comment was along those lines, there’s other fronts to attack in decarbonising, and we’re all in on a tiny fraction of it purely for the profit that it generates. I was just underlining how some stuff that many Americans like to see as their personal freedom is actually endangering all of us.
100% agree with this take DT. Lieberman seems to just want a hot take to get clicks.
His whole schtick is having a hot take and being (what he thinks is) cheeky with his opinions. Jonny is a disconnected clown that no one should be considering for his opinion not advice.
Jonny lost any credibility with me when he claimed on TST lithium could be recycled just the same way aluminum could be. Don’t get me wrong – lithium batteries are highly recyclable but that’s a gross oversimplification. Then when the InEVitable Podcast hosted the chief engineer of Nikola and offered zero challenge against anything he claimed… pathetic.
I listened to Lieberman attempting to make this argument recently on Matt Farah’s Smoking Tire podcast and I thought he was wrong then as I do now. Farah also disagreed with him.
Lieberman’s view seems far too simplistic to hold up the flimsy claims. I’m very pro-EV, but the reality is that they simply aren’t feasible for most of the driving public in the US. Maybe if you have a second backup car with ICE, but what if you can only have ONE vehicle, in today’s world? Not 10 years from now. Pure EV isn’t going to cut it for many folks, but a plug-in hybrid would be awesome.
Lieberman seems to be existing in a vacuum here. It’s as if he thinks that all people can have multiple cars, or have buddies with gas cars they can borrow, or even care about driving being “fun” in the first place.
Plug-in hybrids are indeed training wheels, but at this point in time, full EVs still can’t ride a bike without them.
Lieberman mixed and drank his own Kool-Aid with the Inevitable Podcast. I like Johnny. I like BEVs. But I’m also a realist. He’s built this stage of his career on these myopic takes. He just can’t see the forest through the trees.
Yep, I’m right there with you. Agree on all points there.
Real world example from this morning at breakfast: guy I know drives a Chevy Volt. His commute is 50 miles round trip, well within the range of the battery. He said out of curiosity he calculated how many miles he had gotten off the (occasional) gas refills he has to do. The answer: 2500 miles off one tank. Which is 8.9 gallons.
One of my old supervisors had a 1st gen Volt. He showed me the connected app on his phone. He had a 70km commute one-way, and he charged at both ends. In 6 months he’d burned 20 liters of fuel according to the app.
The only Volt owner I know has to purposely drive it every now and then to burn gas, otherwise he worries about it sitting in his tank for too long.
2nd gen Volt driver – I’ve gotten just over 4,000 miles per tank (twice, during Covid) and average over 2,000 miles per tank over the 5 years I’ve had the car. My average mpg over that time is 300 MPG. I am fortunate that my work commute just fits within the battery range, but PHEV’s can be a great solution. And since I can charge at home an EV would fit my needs great – but I didn’t buy an EV because 5 years ago it didn’t pencil financially in comparison.
I am continually surprised by DT’s pro-PHEV stance given that now he lives in a state with a serious smog regime, his history of wrenching on extreme beaters, and having personally had a PHEV battery replaced under America’s best warranty.
Let’s say at 160,000 miles, one of the battery cells go bad. That not only means a degraded range, but throws a CEL. CEL means it cannot pass CA smog, period. Your only choices are replace the battery pack or junk the car. In a full EV you’d drive the degraded battery to the ground, like for your Nissan Leaf, because it’s not subject to smog. In a 1kwh non-PHEV you’d simply replace the pack for $1000.
My *ideal* PHEV (since we like the PHEV concept enough to buy one and drive it to the ground) would have a modular ~100 mile water cooled battery pack where 8-10 individual batteries could be replaced independently (and maybe be the same standard form factor as a single HEV battery) so replacements post-150k are cheap and available, and the ICE would be a fully modular, serial generator that you could buy in a standard crate form and drop in with an engine hoist and plug the rest of the car into with a single orange HV cord.
If we can’t do that, the failure modes after the 150k mile warranty are too many and too expensive for them to make sense over either a traditional hybrid or an EV.
Not criticizing your argument, but it reminded me of this. Funny enough, it looks like it got pulled from YouTube.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8v8w2c
I mostly agree with this article, but the fundamental issue with getting more people in PHEVs is that the math doesn’t work out in most cases.
And I say this as someone who drives a 15 mpg SUV.
First, there is no PHEV equivalents that I know of. Though this may change.
There are not very many hybrid equivalents either. So that means limited selection with higher costs.
A PHEV equivalent (think Sequoia), if it even existed in the first place, would be even more expensive.
This completely kills any expected gas cost savings in a typical 15-25k per year scenario.
There is no financial incentive to go with a PHEV with the current gas prices, even full EVs are barely worth it as it is. Unless you’re in a very specific situation (think solar panels, cheap electricity, etc)
Now if gas was 3-4x as expensive as it is today then it’d be a stronger case for switching.
The real problem is the Motor Trend article isn’t really about PHEV’s at all. Sure, they’re the topic covered, but the article, like just about all other news these days, is about generating views and clicks. People have strong opinions about PHEV’s either way and they click on this article to either reaffirm their beliefs or so they can brood and complain because they disagree. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same place publishes an article by another author extolling the virtues of PHEV’s within weeks.
IMO, the PHEV sweet spot for range is 100 miles EV + 200 miles ICE. The EV range provides enough incentive to make it worthwhile to plug in daily to cover nearly all commuting and urban/suburban driving needs and 200+ miles of ICE range is good enough for 2-3 hours of road tripping between fueling stops which is enough for drivers with normal bladders and eating habits. 200 miles of ICE range is also short enough to make trips to the fueling station frequent enough to be inconvenient if the owner mainly uses the ICE.
Why isn’t the added cost mentioned at all? I’m not anti-PHEV, but I’ve got to presume that for most car buyers, it simply isn’t worth the added cost over a normal hybrid. Just look at the price difference between the “normal” Prius and the Prius Prime. The ~$3,000 price difference buys roughly 800 gallons of gas at today’s prices, which translates to roughly 45,000 miles given the regular Prius fuel economy.
Don’t PHEVs will count towards the federal EV credits?
If they meet the requirements (made in North America, no Chinese battery parts/materials, etc.). And, unlike the EV lease deals, you don’t see financing companies offering the lease loophole (which I believe could still apply, but they don’t have to pass it along if they do claim the tax credit, so lessees are kind of at their whims).
I think some of the problem here is that you can look at some of the PHEVs on the market and easily come to the conclusion that PHEVs are a shitty compromise (as you do point out).
The Jeep Wrangler 4xe gets worse gas mileage than the 4 cyl gasser and has pretty limited electric range. The Hornet is less efficient than a lot of its competition, has limited electric range, and has had reliability issues.
You get into a little bit better ones and it doesn’t necessarily give you too much hope. The Sportage gets a little better mpg than the gasser, but the regular hybrid gets better yet and the price difference might make people think twice. The Toyotas have such limited availability and high demand that people aren’t willing to wait for a Prime.
And nobody is currently selling a mass-market range-extended EV in the US, which would be exactly the thing that could get PHEV doubters on board. The MX30 could have been that, but Mazda decided we don’t get it. The Ramcharger could be a really big hit–popular segment that’s normally not fuel-efficient, good EV performance, and a potential to cover people who absolutely wouldn’t be using a straight EV.
I’m hoping we see more range-extenders soon. Those could do a lot more to get people to zero emissions than the current PHEVs or EVs.
This is the important thing that would help everyone get onboard, I think.
I wonder how many people buy the 4xe for EV range, and not just the $7500 rebate. I remember when the BMW X5 PHEV qualified for the credit, the pricing was such that you’d be a fool to not get the PHEV and save money. As a result, PHEV models (at least in my area) sold immediately while the run of the mill X5s sat on the lot for a month.
My buddy has a Wrangler 4xe Sahara, so more street oriented tires. He plugs in every night, and the battery covers about half of his daily commute. He’s been averaging around 30mpg so I’d say it’s not too bad.
Glad he’s happy with that, but it’s not great. Better than he’d do with a gasser.
If half his driving is EV, that 30 mpg average means he’s getting worse mpg than advertised when on gas. I’m guessing he’s driving more than just his commute, so he’s probably getting the 20mpg advertised on gas. Hard to say without all the numbers.
I was excited for the 4xe. I thought it was a great vehicle to electrify, since the Wrangler isn’t great on gas, it would be nice to have a quiet 4-wheeling experience, and electric torque could come in handy. But it is ultimately disappointing to me. They could have done a lot better.
What would be a non-disappointing, yet realistic MPG target for it? I mean, it’s a Wrangler so no matter what it won’t be great. Longer trips he’s mentioned being in the mid 20’s. I average 23mpg overall and anywhere from 20-28mpg depending on speed / headwind with my ZR2 diesel but that has all the aero of a brick and 285 BFG KO2s.
True that a Wrangler won’t be great, but the 4 cyl shouldn’t get better gas mileage without the hybrid (hybrid is rated 20mpg, the non-hybrid 22). I’d expect a rating of 25 or so, though that would likely rely on a significantly higher city rating than highway. I’d also like to see better electric range (which would bump up the mpge from the 49 it gets now, even without other efficiency increases, but a better battery might see efficiency gains in hybrid mode, too).
EPA ratings don’t always reflect real world results. Plus, the EPA site doesn’t specify which models were tested, other than it wasn’t a Rubicon 4xe. Just a difference in tires could account for that 2mpg. I lost about 2-3mpg upsizing tires on my ZR2, but I’m still getting 4mpg above the EPA rating of 19 overall.
And they already gave up 4 gallons of fuel space to fit the battery pack as it is. How much do you want to compromise? I’d say just having them do a hybrid wrangler in the first place is a win.
The PHEV advantage is never reflected in EPA tests or professional reviews. They’re based on testing the car’s efficiency at a steady speed, or driving many hours during the few days they have the car. Neither method reflects the way normal owners use their cars. Most of my trips are for 10 miles or less, to local shopping or parks, etc. My PHEV, with less than 20 miles EV range, uses zero gas on those trips, and it adds up. Plus, every trip has a first 20 miles, and that adds up too.
PHEVs are a poor choice if you’re insistent on using no gas, but an excellent option if you want to use lass gas.
I’m a PHEV owner and user. The PHEV advantage for short trips is real, but that doesn’t change that some are better than others and a range-extended EV provides more consistent performance and enough range to cover more of your regular driving. I’m not saying PHEVs are bad. I’m saying that they could be a lot better.
I left out some examples up there, because I’m talking about disappointments. The Niro, for example, gets almost the same mpg in the PHEV as the regular hybrid, and it is readily available. Not the most fun to drive, but it’s a better compromise than the Wrangler. The Toyotas, if they were available, offer more electric range than many others, plus they are pretty efficient in hybrid mode (and a lot more peppy than the Niro).
And I think the EPA testing gets the PHEV advantage just fine. They show mpge that assumes a fair amount of EV-only use.
I just checked that again, and evidently the fuieleconomy.gov site has been changed. Two MPG and MPGe figures are given to predict Hybrid and EV operation. This is a better representation of the potential benefits, but it’s still harder to predict the MPG performance of these cars across different use cycles.
I don’t get the argument that PHEV owners never charge. PHEVs are not “free”. If you want a RAV4 Prime instead of a RAV4 Hybrid, you are paying $8-9K for it. Who pays that to not use the key feature? Maybe if you are buying a $120k vehicle, the customers says “screw it” and buys the most expensive model. But the $40k price point? I doubt customers are just burning $8k for fun.
A car like the Volt was not as efficient running on gas as say a Prius was. It also wasn’t cheaper. So again, unless you are charging, why bother? I actually didn’t buy a Volt because my long commute would have had me running on gas too much, so the Prius made more sense.
I’d love a PHEV for my next car, it makes perfect sense. I just wish they were most cost effective. The Prius Prime is only $5k more, so maybe the math could work with that one, but the RAV4 or the Lexus PHEVs are pretty large premiums.
Bought my loaded RAV4 Prime when it had the $7500 tax credit so just over 40k. Depends on usage case, I’m at 25k miles. Average is at 86 mpg. Electric cost is a dollar plus cheaper than gas equivalent. City speeds without HVAC yield over a fifty mile EV range. 302 horsepower available when needed in hybrid mode. Totally works for me..
Yeah they were a good deal with the tax credit. Wish I bought one then. Now, they are slightly discounted from MSRP it seems, but that is still $46-7k vs. $40k loaded for a RAV4 hybrid. $7k buys a lot of gas, even at $4-5/gal.
I’ve read elsewhere that the claim about low recharging rates for PHEVs stems from one study that included a large proportion of fleet and municipal vehicles. These were driven by employees who didn’t pay fuel costs, carried prepaid gas cards and may not have driven the PHEVs home where they could be charged at night. That’s hardly a typical ownership situation.
There have been other studies, but they also have flaws. One leaned on Fuelly. I don’t know many PHEV owners who use that to consistently calculate overall fuel mileage. Most only plug in the numbers for road trips and the like, which would make it appear that they are routinely running on gas.
My Ford Energi, a 2017 C-Max, has a prominent display for cumulative MPG. I never reset it, so I have a lifetime average. Cumulative average fuel economy is the only number I care about, not how many pure-EV trips I’ve taken. The climate doesn’t care about that.
I only care about my gas mileage when I have to take a trip where I’ll be using it. The rest of the time, I try to stick to EV as much as possible. And, coincidentally, since those cumulative displays do pretty well these days, entering your info into Fuelly to calculate would be of a lot more use when you want info that is not already displayed by your vehicle.
If only some manufacturer could come up with something like a Chevy Volt, 15 Yeats later.
The ideal PHEV is a range-extended EV with enough battery that you won’t need to burn gas in the engine during your errands. Without this, you’ll get roughly the same carbon footprint as a hybrid.
The ideal EV has enough range and/or charging speed that you won’t need to borrow a beater gas car during your weekend getaways. Without this, you’ll get the same carbon footprint as a hybrid. Again.
Neither the ideal EV nor the ideal PHEV is being delivered at prices accessible to the middle class. Not that they can’t be, they just aren’t. The BMW i3 REx was ideal and I’m happy it’s getting some love on this site, but the MSRP was $49k. The EV6 is ideal, but the MSRP is $47k, and the incentives are not guaranteed.
Arguing over whether EVs are better than PHEVs is fruitless because the best examples of each are either out of production, unaffordable, produced in tiny loss-leader quantities, or all of the above. We should be incentivizing whichever can be brought to market at an affordable price with uncompromised performance the fastest… and nobody outside of automotive R&D is qualified to say which technology is better for that job.
a lot of PHEVs have an intelligent hybrid mode that will mix EV, Gas, and both on a full charge. you can get 100+mpg. if you are going to drive further than the EV range this could be more efficient than draining the ev range down right off the jump in the first 30 miles of your trip.
You don’t really don’t get 100+ mpg for any length of time out of them. In general, you’ll get around the same combined gas mileage whether you use the EV miles up first or over the course of the trip, since the way they are set up means you always have enough battery to operate as a normal hybrid. If you’re going a short enough distance that you’re achieving the 100+, you probably would have averaged that considering the first X miles being on electric, too.
I currently run a PHEV and have done a lot of research into whether I want to get another or go full EV.
I picked up a 23 Volvo XC90 T8 (PHEV) last week and I’m smitten with it. Most of my driving is around town with the kids and the 31 mile range takes care of that. It’s buttery smooth and in all reality the 143 hp electric motor provides adequate acceleration. It starts in pure electric every time I go to use it which is fantastic and I absolutely love regen braking.
We were extremely close to buying a R1S instead but we live in WI (no service) and frequently visit the UP of Michigan. There are no fast chargers on our routes yet. We could probably make it in summer but definitely not in the middle of winter with range loss. The Volvo alleviates that stress and still returns great MPG in hybrid mode over a longer trip. For people like us who live and travel to areas with very minimal charging infrastructure PHEVs are absolutely the correct answer.
I think this line of yours sums it up all very well.
It always felt that way to me.
MT’s takes are garbage clickbait, leave them to TV, not automotive journalism.
…It’s terrifying to think how high up Johnny Lieberman is on the MT food chain…
MT is not even worth the time to read. Just crap now days.
I think PHEVs make sense and should absolutely be a consideration for most.
What bothers me as a car enthusiast is the generally limited performance you get in EV mode for most of these. Even performance oriented PHEVs heavily rely on the gas engine to provide the full output/performance you expect.
Presumably the point of a PHEV is to stay battery powered for most applications. Now you’ve just spent serious money on a high-output PHEV and you almost never feel the performance.
This is true even of non-performance PHEVs. Take the Prius Prime. 6.5 seconds to 60, which is downright quick for a Prius. In electric mode only, that becomes a painfully slow 11.2 seconds. You’ve just paid for the most expensive Prius only to get the slowest one in the driving you’ll actually be doing.
Do you know this for a fact, from experience? That’s certainly not the case with my Ford C-Max. The highest Interstate highway pass is 40 miles west of me, and 6,000 feet above. The plug-in portion of my battery is long gone before I get there, but the car remains just as powerful all the way up. The EV battery is partitioned into plug-in and hybrid portions. The hybrid portion is charged from the engine’s power, and remains available at all times.
Beyond Loveland Pass comes the real fun. The car can regain 10 miles of EV range from regenerative braking on the long downgrade. A regular hybrid wouldn’t be able to regain and store that much power.
IIRC the C-Max Energi is only like 90ish hp in EV mode, versus 190ish in hybrid mode.
That sounds about right. But I climb the steep parts in hybrid mode, with both sides of the powertrain turning and burning. You have to drive one to understand, I guess. The car uses both PHEV power and ICE in the proper proportion until the plug-in power is gone. Then it runs as a hybrid, with full power available. The Hybrid portion of the battery is continuously recharged by the ICE, as it has to be. Fun fact- every time the car pulls away from a stop, it’s by Hybrid battery power only.
Bottom line – I’ve never run into a situation where the car lost power due to low batteries. If I can do that in Colorado, you can do it too.
That’s not what Ppnw meant, though (that problem is a thing on i3 RExes in the US, especially the 60 Ah ones).
What they meant is that you’re only getting full performance in the mode that Ford calls “EV Auto”, which as you say, will use the engine to get that full performance. If you force it into “EV Now”, which prevents the engine from starting – the mode that you might want to use if your goal is to have an EV most of the time and just have an ICE for trips that are too long for the battery – you have less than half the horsepower available.
Usually I prefer EV Auto. The exception is a drive downtown in light traffic. I use EV Later on the freeway, where the ICE works at best efficiency, and switch to EV Now for downtown streets, with all their gas-sucking traffic lights and other impediments. Does it make any difference? Not much, in the long run.
EV Now isn’t like a set-and-forget light switch. It’is easily overridden when you mash the accelerator pedal hard, so you actually always have full power available when you need it.
Ah. (Some designs actually do have an EV mode that disables the ICE.) Still, the point remains, that if you want “an EV that is range extended”, a design that fires the ICE for full performance isn’t it.
(Granted, one of the PHEVs that actually does have full performance without the ICE, the Gen 1 Chevy Volt, does it by artificially restricting performance with the ICE – the Cadillac ELR with the same powertrain has significantly more power with the ICE running in certain modes. This would be the case for most PHEVs that have some kind of mechanical link between ICE and wheels, as well – about the only exception I can see is, you could design a power split system with a one-way clutch like the Prius/RAV4 Prime and Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid, and size MG1 and the battery large enough to actually get full system power with the ICE off. (And, MG1 deploying power on a power split system IIRC forces engine RPM down, limiting power there – that’s actually why the one-way clutch is needed, to force MG1 torque to the wheels instead of to spinning the engine backwards.)
Yeah, that’s exactly right. I look at Range Rover plug-ins or X5 plug-ins as an example. You’ll want to be on the battery most of the time because that’s the whole point of a PHEV.
But then you end up with a car with a fraction of the performance it has because you never use the gasoline.
The Range Rover Sport PHEV has a 141hp electric motor. $83k base price to drive around a 2 ton car with 141hp is tough to swallow. Yes, the performance is there, but the point of a PHEV is to not use gas unless necessary.
For me personally, give me a full beans EV with a ton of power or a gas engine.
But again, for the purposes of this article I totally agree, PHEVs are great for most.
“First, if it’s inconvenient for these folks to charge, then how do we expect to sell them EVs, which require charging?”
Good point!
Arguably, if they don’t have the gas engine to fall back on, they’ll take the extra 5 seconds to plug in.
But the studies that claim a large portion of PHEVs don’t get charged are flawed, anyway. One was a study involving vehicles provided to employees (who would have to pay for the electricity, but not the gas). Another relied on Fuelly data–I don’t think most people are tracking gas mileage when they are running on electric, so it would be skewed toward road trips and such. Sure, the assumptions of how much EV use they’ll get can be optimistic, but that’s no reason to make incredibly pessimistic assumptions based on a few flawed studies.
Although, the one that counted vehicles provided to employees was valid in a European context of those being the ones that were sold en masse…
That’s pertinent to fleet sales, but not relevant or predictive of what ordinary civilians will do.
That’s not a flaw in PHEVs, but in the economic incentives surrounding them. To increase fleet car recharging, take away employees’ free gas cards. Compensate them instead with free charger installations and some stipend that exceeds their additional electricity costs.
Serious question coming from someone who has previously owned an EV and currently owns a PHEV. I’ve never paid attention to this 80% charging limit thing because I was always under the impression that the battery has a “usable” capacity and an “actual” capacity, and I figured the battery management system from the manufacturer would handle the charging limit for me within the range of the “actual” capacity. So is it *really* true that charging no higher than 80% actually has any real-world impact on modern battery system longevity? How much of an impact? The whole 80% thing feels to me like it’s an urban legend from the early days of EVs and I’m legit curious if there are real studies of modern battery systems that support the idea.
Depends on the EV. My Cupra recommends only charging to 80% regularly to preserve battery life, but many are ok with full charges all the time (eg Tesla)
Hybrids do this in the background for you. EVs do not.
With Lithium-Nickel Manganese Cobalt (NMC) or Lithium-Nickel Cobalt Aluminum (NCA) batteries (the most energy dense types), in automotive applications, which are typically 3.6 volts nominal, they’ll typically have an “actual” capacity based on charging to 4.2 volts at 100%, and discharging to 2.8 volts. Limiting to 4.0-4.1 volts maximum per cell (roughly in the 80-90% ballpark) does help longevity compared to 4.2 volts per cell (note that part of why batteries die so fast in laptops and cell phones is that 100% in those is as high as 4.4 volts nowadays), especially if you’re going to keep the battery fully charged (charging to high voltages isn’t great for those chemistries, keeping it there is even worse). 4.2 volts is completely safe unless there’s a battery manufacturing defect, but it’s not good for those chemistries.
The “usable” versus “actual” capacity is usually at the bottom end of the pack, where the BMS might stop discharge at 2.9-3.0 volts per cell instead of the 2.8 volts allowed by the datasheet (as going down there can also damage the cell some).
Conversely, some EVs use Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4 or LFP) batteries, which are less energy dense, but are significantly cheaper, safer even with defects or physical damage, and longer lasting. That chemistry is lower voltage (a lot of why it’s less energy dense) – 3.2 volts nominal, 3.6 volts maximum, 2.5 volts minimum. And, LFP handles being charged to and even kept at 3.6 volts with very little degradation.
(This is also why Tesla recommends that a standard range car be charged to 100% all the time – it helps the BMS calibrate properly with the discharge curve of LFP, and it does very little damage to the cells. Conversely, this is also why they recommend limiting to 90% on all their other cars, because they’re using NCA cells that would have their life shortened by a 100% charge.)
Also, you might see some discussion of LMFP, or Lithium Manganese Iron Phosphate, cells, as they’re a new thing. Those are interesting – they basically behave like LFP at 3.6 volts or lower, but you can get them up to something like 4.0-4.2 volts for better energy density with some degradation, but nowhere near as bad as NMC or NCA. Really looking forward to those things being a thing.