America Focusing On Electric Cars And Not Plug-In Hybrids Was A Huge Mistake

For years now, journalists, analysts, consultants, manufacturers and many others in the auto industry have considered plug-in hybrids a “transition technology” that will stick around for a few years until we see a mass adoption of fully electric vehicles. Because of this widely-held sentiment, a number of big players in the car world, including General Motors, have reduced plug-in hybrid development and focused heavily on fully electric cars.

“The quicker you get to our goal of zero emissions, the better, and EVs get you there faster,” GM’s CEO Mary Barra told Motor Trend back in 2019. “So why dedicate a lot of capital and engineering into a segment that doesn’t get you to the end game when we know how to do the end game?” Well, in this week’s David’s Takes (our weekly op-ed) I assert that this thinking was deeply, deeply flawed and that PHEVs should be considered not just a “transition technology,” but rather a long-term solution. And I’ll take it a step further: I think America ignoring them was a humongous mistake.

The internal combustion engine shouldn’t be considered the enemy, but rather an ally in the world’s efforts to clean up vehicle emissions. To many, this notion may sound absurd; how can a car that burns fossil fuels possibly be advantageous over one that doesn’t? Is this some kind of anti-EV screed written by a gas-loving nutjob?

No. I like electric cars and own two of them. And as an engineer, I find them to be vastly superior to ICEs in most ways; the mechanical simplicity, the efficiency, the ability to regenerate energy while braking, the power delivery — an electric car is an objectively better way to get around than a gas car, and anyone who says otherwise is kidding themselves. Still, though I like EVs, it’s clear to me that America focusing on them instead of PHEVs has severely set the country back.

PHEVs Have Been An Afterthought In The U.S.

I’m going to start by establishing the premise that everyone’s goal is to make cars cleaner for the environment. I realize that there are folks out there who don’t care about climate change, and there are those who don’t think driving electric is better for the environment than driving a gas car. And while the latter assertion can be true in some cases, in the overwhelming majority of instances where you’re comparing two cars in the same class — one gas and one electric — the electric one will have been better for the environment by the time it ends up in the junkyard. That’s really not up for debate anymore.

With that out of the way, we can jump to our next premise, which is that we can improve the environmental impact of cars by — as quickly as possible — maximizing the number of people we can get to stop burning fossil fuels by replacing internal combustion cars with electric cars.

With these premises established, I’m going to spend this article arguing that, today, plug-in hybrids are the best vehicles to accomplish these goals — even better than EVs — and that America’s focus on the latter has actually hurt us.

But first, let’s talk about what I mean when I say America has ignored PHEVs and focused on EVs. Doesn’t the U.S. have plug-in hybrids for sale?

Yes, there are some plug-in hybrids available today, but there are more fully electric cars for sale than there are PHEVs (40 versus 33, per EVadoption.com), and there are key segments that offer no plug-ins at all (there are zero plug-in hybrid pickup trucks – an inefficient segment that stands to gain the most from electrification — and five fully electric pickups); that’s just absurd. Perhaps just as important as the quantity of offerings is the quality of those offerings; fully-electric models currently for sale are much more compelling than the PHEVs on the marketplace.

One cannot possibly compare a Ford Escape PHEV to a Mustang Mach-E. One is sleek, was named “Mustang” specifically to amplify its coolness in order to compete with Tesla, and stands out. The other is just the top-of-the-range version of an economy-crossover, it’s actually more expensive than the Mach-E, and its all-electric range is a meager 37 miles. This is pretty standard across PHEVs; they’re the most expensive version of another already-existing car, and while that price can be cut by certain government incentives, the range of most PHEVs is between 25 and 40 miles; that’s just sad. What’s more, it’s not just that there are only a few good PHEVs currently on the market; the other issue is marketing. Namely, there hasn’t been enough of it.

For one, PHEVs usually don’t get their own nameplates — they’re just trim levels since most are built on platforms shared with gas cars. They also rarely get their own media drives, so reviews you read about them are mixed in with the gas variants. And most importantly, they just don’t get the same spotlight as EVs; when was the last time you saw a Ford Escape PHEV commercial? Compare that to the number of times you saw a Mustang Mach-E commercial, or even a Ford F-150 Lightning (which is basically just an electric version of an F-150) commercial.

(Note: Some of PHEVs’ marketing problems are just the nature of the beast; fully electric cars seem advanced to the layperson, while hybrids just don’t, since we’ve all been hearing about hybrids for the past 25 years. A “plug-in hybrid” just doesn’t excite people in the same way as “EV” does, even if a plug-in hybrid is often more technically advanced than an EV (for better or for worse)).

There’s a reason I wrote a few weeks ago that “America’s Plug-In Hybrids Aren’t Good Enough.” The vehicles are an afterthought. I mean, look at America’s coolest PHEVs:

• 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
• Mazda CX-90 PHEV: 26 miles
• BMW X5 xDrive50e: 38 miles
• BMW 330e: 23 miles
• Toyota Prius Prime: 44 miles
• Toyota RAV4 Prime: 42 miles
• Lexus RX450h+: 37 miles

And compare that to these EVs:

• Tesla Cybertruck: up to ~340 miles
• Rivian R1S: up to ~350 miles
• Rivian R1T: up to ~350 miles
• Ford Mustang Mach-E: up to ~310 miles
• Tesla Model 3: up to ~360 miles
• Tesla Model Y: up to ~330 miles
• Tesla Model X: up to ~350 miles
• Hyundai Ioniq 5: up to ~300 miles
• Kia EV6: up to ~310 miles
• Lucid Air: up to ~420 miles

One list is a snoozefest filled with cars that will barely get you to work and back (Prius Prime notwithstanding; Rav4 is also decent) [Editor’s note: Don’t sleep on the spacious Mazda CX-90 PHEV, the opulent X5 50e, or the excellent 330e either -TH], the other is dynamic and exciting and forward-thinking. No wonder EV sales are absolutely crushing PHEV sales by a factor of almost four to one.

Of course, things are changing, and automakers are realizing that ignoring PHEVs was a massive mistake. That’s why you’re seeing headlines like “GM Does A U-Turn: Plug-In Hybrids Are Coming Back” and “GM Hustling To Get PHEV Chevy Silverado, GMC Sierra To Market” as well as “Carmakers pumped the brakes on hybrid cars too soon” and so on.

I hope these automakers build some proper PHEVs, though, and I hope they market them properly without actually calling them PHEVs. Ideally, they’ll call them what people used to call the BMW i3 — a range-extended EV (which is a much sexier term) — and I hope they build them on electric platforms so that they’re actually solidly compelling vehicles. I’ll repeat what I wrote in my op-ed “America’s Plug-In Hybrids Aren’t Good Enough”:

…precisely my problem with the current crop of plug-in hybrids [is that] they’re clearly gasoline cars first, electric cars second. The 30 miles or so of EV range is considered a nifty feature of someone’s otherwise gasoline vehicle. The issue, in my eyes, is that in America there are no plug-in hybrids that are electric cars first, gasoline cars second, and that needs to change. And I think … that transition point from gas car first to EV first starts to happen at about 50-100 miles of range.

The state of California is incentivizing automakers to crank up PHEV range, with the California Air Resources Board writing:

Plug-in hybrid, full battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles count toward an automaker’s requirement. PHEVs must have an all-electric range of at least 50 miles under real-world driving conditions.

That’s awesome, though the state loses me at “In addition, automakers will be allowed to meet no more than 20% of their overall ZEV requirement with PHEVs.” This is silly.

Until the Ramcharger launches, America offers no such EV-first range-extended EVs — just those relatively boring, low-range PHEVs in the list above. But even if we do start cranking out great, forward-thinking range-extended EV offerings, the damage from ignoring this segment and instead focusing on EVs is already done.

The Environmental Effects Of Neglecting PHEVs

It may seem counterintuitive, but a plug-in hybrid can actually be better for the environment than a fully electric car. To best understand this, we have to consider how most Americans drive. A typical American will commute about 15 miles a day, one way. Some days they might have to buy groceries, some days they might have to take their kid to a swim meet, but for the most part, weekday commutes are reasonably regular/predictable, and not particularly long.

The very cleanest car, we can probably all agree, is a small electric one with a battery sized exactly for that commute. I myself drive 17 miles a day to work (one way), and I might drive an extra 10 miles to get groceries or do another errand). That’s 44 miles; add a few for safety, and really, all I need is a car with a 50-mile range. A car with a 50-mile range is the very cleanest car I could possibly drive, because it features the smallest battery needed to allow me to live my normal lifestyle.

If I were to drive a car with similar dimensions to, and with a similar powertrain as, a Tesla Model Y (which according to the EPA has a range of 3.57 miles per kWh of juice, though I realize this changes based on mass, but for simplicity let’s just roll with it), I would need a 14 kWh battery to live my lifestyle (50 mi/3.57 mi/kwh = 14 kWh). That’s a TINY battery, and as such, the resources needed to make it would be pretty minimal; that matters because manufacturing lithium-ion batteries is currently a dirty process.

Is anyone going to actually buy a 14kWh battery-having EV offering only 50 miles of range (Note: you would likely need a larger battery to get 50 miles in a cold climate)? Absolutely not (unless it’s hilariously cheap). Just look at the Mazda MX-30; that was an electric car with 100 miles of range, and it got laughed out of the marketplace. It was a total failure. People may only need 50 miles most days, but nobody wants to feel limited, and there will surely be instances where one has to drive 200 miles for vacation or to visit the grandparents or whatever, and charging a million times to drive what should take only a few hours is something most folks would consider absurd.

So what’s the solution? There are two. If you look at the electrified vehicles available in the American market, it’s clear most automakers have decided that the answer is to shove another 60+ kWh of batteries into that car.

Take the Tesla Model Y Long Range that I used as an example earlier. It’s got a 75 kWh battery (that’s usable capacity; full capacity is 82 kWh) in order to give it 330 miles of range — enough to ease up most owners’ range anxiety. Again, many folks are going to drive that vehicle under 50 miles a day, carrying around 280 miles worth of battery — 60 kWh, which is 80 percent of the total capacity — every day for no reason other than peace of mind. That’s probably 700 pounds of expensive, dirty-to-produce lithium ion batteries being hauled around daily as the car drives around going to work and doing errands.

Now let’s look at the second solution. Imagine that 14 kWh Model Y, but instead of adding a 60 kWh battery to ease people’s range anxiety, you add a small gasoline engine hooked up to a generator. The vast majority of the time, that car will be driven on battery power alone, and the gasoline engine, along with its ancillary components like the fuel tank and cooling system, will sit dormant, just as the 60 kWh worth of battery would on a Model Y Long Range.

The car that best lines up with this analogy is the BMW i3 range-extended EV, which features a 19 kWh battery and a small gasoline engine. This is what I daily drive (yes, I practice what I’m preaching):

 

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Of the two options, it’s clear that the hybrid (or range-extended EV) makes more sense. It’s lighter (which matters not just to reduce Vehicle Demand Energy (i.e. the energy needed to propel the car forward) but also because tire dust is a nasty type of pollution, and weight doesn’t help on that front), it’s cheaper (I’ll get to that in a bit), and though there are emissions associated with producing a small gasoline engine and its ancillary components, it’s clear that manufacturing a 60kWh battery is significantly dirtier. This becomes obvious when you consider that a fully electric car takes 15,000 miles (ish — this depends on a number of factors) to become cleaner than a fully-gasoline car. If the emissions associated with producing and running an EV are so high that a gasoline car has to shoot 15,000 miles worth of combustion products into the sky before the EV is cleaner, it goes without saying that a PHEV with a battery 20 percent of the size and a gas engine that rarely turns on is the cleaner solution.

There are lots of caveats to all of this, of course. If you live in an apartment, charging a PHEV every day is a huge pain in the ass, so you’ll likely run on the gas motor a lot, and this could be less efficient than just a gas car, per Consumer Reports; so really, this assessment applies mostly to folks who can easily charge their car every day. That’s not an insignificant number of people, as many have garages/driveways near their houses, and others can charge at work. It’s also worth noting that this all assumes that the small 14kWh battery can handle all the charge/discharge cycles. Many modern battery packs can, but in an instance where you have to replace the small battery because it can’t handle all the charging sessions (as was the case with my i3), the calculus will then start to favor BEVs. Another thing worth noting: If you’re running on the gasoline engine a lot, then BEVs (even with huge batteries) will of course end up winning out over a PHEV when it comes to pollution. There are a number of studies showing BEVs beating out the current crop of PHEVs when it comes to emissions reduction over gas cars, and I assume these are based on significant gas engine usage.

14 kWh may not be enough for some folks. Ideally, you’d analyze a sweep of battery sizes, assess how each of them affects the duty cycle of the gasoline engine, and weigh that against the environmental effects of producing that battery size. The ideal PHEV would be one that allowed the most people to use the gasoline engine the least, while keeping the battery size as small as possible. It’s a complicated analysis that requires an understanding of human behavior; maybe 14 kWh is enough for someone, but because it only offers 50 miles of range, they’re less incentivized to charge it when they’re on their rare road trip. If they go on that road trip enough times, perhaps a slightly larger battery could be worthwhile, since it’d lead them to stop and charge it instead of just running along on the gas engine. If someone doesn’t have a garage to charge the car in, how big does a battery need to be to where it makes sense for them to charge at a public charger instead of just driving on the gas engine?

Regardless of all the caveats, my point is that, in plenty of scenarios, a PHEV is cleaner for the environment than an EV. If you don’t trust me, the PHEV Toyota Prius Prime was just determined to be the cleanest car in America, ahead of BEVs, due to its relatively low energy usage and smaller battery.

I live in Santa Monica and commute to Van Nuys daily. I have a garage at home in which I can charge my vehicle, and I can charge at work. It’s obvious to me that a Tesla Model Y Long Range would be a complete waste of resources, and significantly dirtier for the environment than my BMW i3, which has a battery with 19kWh of usable capacity — just over 1/4 the size of the Model Y Long Range’s. I daily drive that vehicle, and maybe use the gas motor for 1 percent of the miles I drive. The emissions that my little 647 cc gasoline engine produces, along with those associated with the production of my gas engine+ancillary parts, will likely never outweigh the emissions needed to manufacture over 50 kWh of added battery. Unfortunately, my early i3’s battery ended up kicking the bucket after 135,000 miles, thereby requiring another 19kWh battery, but a later model i3 likely wouldn’t suffer from this charge/discharge longevity issue, and would almost certainly be the best environmental choice for my lifestyle, which is not a particularly uncommon one among Americans.

Supply Constraints Make Ignoring PHEVs Even Worse Of A Decision

The calculus behind the BEV vs PHEV debate is complex, and beyond requiring a thorough understanding of well-to-wheel analyses and human behavioral patterns regarding charging, it requires an understanding of supply chain constraints. And right now, we’re seeing such constraints holding back EV manufacturing. And in a world where battery resources are causing slowdowns, a PHEV (or a range-extended EV) becomes an even more obvious first-choice for reducing climate implications of automobiles.

Why use a 75 kWh battery on a single Tesla Model Y when you could instead use those same battery resources to get four families into a cheaper plug-in hybrid, which they could potentially use in electric mode 99 percent of the time? It’s a concept I’ve been talking about for years, but I’m thrilled to now hear that Toyota — a brand that damn near every automotive publication was critical of, as it was slow to build EVs — is championing it. Recently, our friend Tom McParland from Jalopnik wrote about Toyota’s 1:6:90 rule; here’s a look at it via a dealer document sent to Tom:

I’m not going to get into standard hybrids in this story, but six plug-in hybrids that could potentially very rarely use their gas engines versus one pricier EV? Especially in light of supply constraints, it’s obvious which makes the most sense from an environmental standpoint.

PHEV Palatability Made Ignoring Them Even Worse Of A Decision

Right now, there’s a humongous rift in the U.S. between folks who love EVs and hate gas cars and those who prefer gas cars and hate EVs. It’s an absurdly polarizing issue; my conservative friends say they wouldn’t be caught dead in an electric car, while some of my more liberal friends think gas cars are irresponsible and inefficient and frankly just dumb.

I don’t think this rift would exist to the degree that it does today if we’d had more compelling PHEVs on the market. The fact is that, if you look at a typical parking lot full of cars, these days you’re going to see EVs and gas cars, and not a whole lot in between. Seriously, check out this plot showing BEV sales and plug-in hybrid sales:

And it’s no surprise. Like I wrote before, not only are there more fully electric cars on the market than there are PHEVs, but the BEVs are much, much more compelling than the PHEVs. America hasn’t put enough effort into PHEVs.

And that’s a problem because many Americans aren’t ready to commit to fully-electric cars; it’s a scary, big step, especially in light of infrastructural/power grid concerns and cost. For these people, a PHEV would be the ultimate gateway towards reducing fossil fuel usage.

Today consumers get to choose between cool but too-expensive electric vehicles (especially pickups, though to be sure prices are dropping quickly); gasoline vehicles; and boring, derivative, low-range, also-expensive, simply-not-good-enough PHEVs. The result is that, while more and more people are driving fully electric cars than ever (it’s the fastest growing segment in the U.S. — S&P Global says that “Despite slowing consumer demand for electric vehicles, reports of the demise of EVs have been greatly exaggerated. S&P Global Mobility’s 2024 global sales forecast projects battery electric passenger vehicles to be on track to post 13.3 million units worldwide for 2024 – accounting for an estimated 16.2% of global passenger vehicle sales. For reference, 2023 posted an estimated 9.6 million BEVs, for 12% market share.”), I believe far more people would be driving electric every day if there were more compelling PHEVs on the market.

And far more would then feel comfortable transitioning to fully electric cars once they’d driven a plug-in hybrid. They’d tell their friends, and their friends would tell their friends, and we’d have a lot less polarizing a world when it comes to electric cars vs gas cars than we do today. But that’s just not where we are. Today, if you want a pickup truck, you get to choose between gas and electric, with a few regular hybrids sprinkled in. And because there’s not a plug-in hybrid pickup truck on the lot to win over an anti-EV pickup truck driver and get them to think “You know what? This has a gas motor in it, so it’s not an electric truck. I think I’ll buy this,” only for them to drive around in electric mode the vast majority of the time and gradually change their mind on electric vehicles, the rift continues and skeptics remain skeptics.

The truth is, plug-in hybrids are just more palatable for more people (and because of their small batteries, they don’t require a special Level 2 charger; a regular 110 outlet will general do just fine in my experience), and the importance of that should be extremely obvious to anyone who watches today’s political commercials, which often use EVs to divide a nation that should collectively realize just how great electrification is.

Cost

Let’s talk about cost, because I mentioned it a few times above; we’re seeing PHEVs that cost more than EVs, and yet I claimed before that PHEVs have the potential to be cheaper than EVs, adding to their mass-market palatability.

I haven’t been able to get an exact cost delta between that 75 kWh Model Y and a theoretical 14 kWh one, though I’ve put in a request to my friends at Munro & Associates, the premier EV benchmarking company in the world. Still, I was on Munro’s podcast recently and spoke with Sr. Design Consultant Kevin Harty, who told me that PHEVs are indeed cheaper. And if you look at current lithium-ion battery pricing, it’s easy to understand why.

Batteries currently cost about $120 to $140 per kWh, and though they’re expected to drop below $100 by 2025, an extra 65 kWh worth of battery would still cost $6,500 — that’s probably at least double what a small gasoline engine, generator, and auxiliary components (like the fuel tank, cooling system, and accessories) would cost in a PHEV.

Obviously, the cost equation is complicated by government rebates; when huge numbers like $7500 are being thrown around, that cost delta between a big-battery EV and a small-battery PHEV can shrink. Today, though, PHEVs are eligible for that full $7500 figure, but local rebates (like those offered by power companies) can vary.

Still, if we’re talking just resource-wise, PHEVs have the potential to cost less, and actually still do; from Consumer Reports:

Concern about charging logistics, such as where and when to charge, is a primary reason people are reluctant to purchase an electric vehicle. For many car buyers, a PHEV provides most of the benefits of driving an EV without worries about how and where to charge, Fisher says.

In general, a PHEV costs less to purchase than an EV and is less pricey to fuel than gas or hybrid vehicles.

PHEVs Were The Right Answer, And Still Are

Let me begin by saying that fully-electric cars are ultimately a better answer than plug-in hybrids, and I’m thrilled to see that EV sales are still strong and growing. The truth is that, if we can get our electricity grid cleaned up to where we’re using only renewables, and especially if we can figure out fast-charging battery tech that’s cleaner and cheaper to manufacture, then gasoline engines and the infrastructure that supports them will have no place outside of perhaps commercial applications. But that’s not happening anytime soon, and we need to focus on — as quickly as possible — getting as many butts driving electric as possible. And to do that, range-extended PHEVs (which, yes, add additional complexity/failure modes to EVs, and are packaging compromises) are the answer, at least for the next decade or two.

I’ll repeat a quote from GM president Mark Reuss — one quite similar to the one from Mary Barra in my lede paragraph. This one’s from The Wall Street Journal:

If I had a dollar more to invest, would I spend it on a hybrid?…Or would I spend it on the answer that we all know is going to happen, and get there faster and better than anybody else?”

Let’s put this quote into different terms. Reuss is implying that it makes more sense to spend limited battery resources to get one V8 Chevy Silverado driver to trade in for a ridiculous 200 kWh (!) Silverado EV than it does to take that hideously large battery, split it into four, and get four Silverado V8 drivers to stop cruising around getting 13 MPG and spewing CO2 into the atmosphere. It’s nonsense, but this is exactly what GM chose: fewer, pricier EVs instead of more, cheaper, more palatable (especially to EV skeptics not ready to go full-BEV), lighter PHEVs that could potentially each be better for the environment than their EV counterpart (and certainly, when you factor in the number of people now able to drive around predominantly electricity instead of gas, overall it’s much, much better for the environment, as Toyota concludes with its 1:6:90 rule).

How’s that working out for GM? Let’s check out S&P global’s 2024 EV forecast to get a general idea of the state of the industry:

Despite the slowdown in consumer sentiment toward EVs, there is nonetheless an ongoing necessity for emissions reductions – with EV regulations and milestones largely intact and looming a year closer. However, slowing consumer desire for existing EVs could boost profitable internal combustion engine (ICE) markets and legacy automaker portfolios, driving consolidation and attracting private equity interest.

Crucial strategic decisions regarding capital expenditures in the electrification space need to be made in the near term. Several OEMs are beyond the point of no return in their shift to EVs, while some suppliers might be questioning the wisdom of going “all in” on EVs quite so soon.

Now let’s peek at GM specifically — from Reuters:

General Motors Co said on Tuesday it will delay production of electric pickup trucks at its plant in Michigan’s Orion Township by a year as the No. 1 U.S. automaker grapples with flattening demand for electric vehicle.

The move is the latest sign that electric vehicle production and demand may not be as strong as forecast. GM had been set to begin production of the electric Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra in late 2024 at the suburban Detroit plant. The company said the plan now is to start it in late 2025.

During its earnings call on January 30, GM announced that the pace of electric vehicle (EV) sales had slowed—a serious concern for a company that doubled down on a pure-EV future just three years ago. As a result, the company has reversed direction and will alter its future product strategy to include plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) in its vehicle lineup.

“Our forward plans include bringing our plug-in hybrid technology to select vehicles in North America,” said CEO Mary Barra. “Let me be clear: GM remains committed to eliminating tailpipe emissions from our light-duty vehicles by 2035. But in the interim, deploying plug-in technology in strategic segments will deliver some of the environmental benefits of EVs as the nation continues to build its charging infrastructure. We are timing the launches to help us comply with the more stringent fuel economy and tailpipe emission standards that are being proposed.”