EDIT clarifications:
- the article is from the European Commission. This thing comes from a serious study based on hard facts and data.
- Check this comment by @wooster@startrek.website, who reported the data.
- Note that plugin hybrids are still better than pure ice, but they were expected to be much better.
It’s not a typo: plug-in hybrids are used, in real word cases, with ICE much more than anticipated.
In the EU, fuel consumption monitoring devices are required on new cars. They studied over 10% of all cars sold in 2021 and turns out they use way more fuel, and generate way more CO2, than anybody thought.
The gap means that CO2 emissions reduction objectives from transport will be more difficult to reach.
Thruth is, we need less cars, not “better” cars.
Seems to be a repeat of the misleading (and outright cheating) scam that diesel emissions turned out to be, although presumably not quite as egregious as what VW did. Although perhaps part of the hybrid problem is that people aren’t actually charging them electrically most of the time, but that is also why hybrids are such a pointless half measure (even more than electric cars are a half measure compared to reducing car dependency).
TBH, the most astonishing reveal from the study for me was that Hybrid owners weren’t charging their vehicles. Unfortunately, the why isn’t covered in the study since it seems to just be hard math and statistical analysis.
Are they just not plugging in at night?
Too frustrated with the battery draining too quickly?
Driving too far for the battery to meaningfully contribute between charges?
Is the extra hardware mass making the ICE that much less efficient?
Laziness from having to fill both the battery and the gas tank?
I think this is the real question. From the stats you posted, I’d say that at most 10% of Plugin hybrid owners charge their vehicles.
Which is such a waste of ressources. Why does someone buy a car with 10 kWh battery and never even use it (beyond what the car charges itself)?
Especially given how much more expensive they are than conventional hybrids and the hoops you have to jump through to even grt one in my family’s experience.
The small battery capacity they have also means that any household outlet will charge them fine, so it would be really interesting to see why people are going through all the extra effort to buy one and then not use it.
Plug-in hybrids are relatively new. At least in Europe most newly purchased cars are leasing and company provided cars. These companies probably thought it would be nice green-washing to buy hybrids. They probably also do not have sufficient charging infrastructure at their parking-lots and do not refund their employees for the electricity costs when they charge at home (or rather it is too bureaucratic for the employees to bother with asking for a refund). Which results that these cars are mostly used the same way as regular non-plugin hybrids, which only the relatively modest fuel savings these provide.
Considering the stories I’ve heard from mechanics about people having their car towed in because they ran out of gas I think people don’t realize they need to plug in their plug in hybrid.
A lot of plug-in hybrid owners took the state support to buy an ICE with a smaller gas tank. And it also can drive electric, but nobody does that.
You don’t have to charge a hybrid to get the benefits of the electric motor. It can charge from regenerative braking. That being said, plugging in a PHEV will maximize the benefits of the system vs relying on regenerative braking alone.
EVs only recover about 90% of the energy used I’m braking with regenerative braking. That means they don’t even recover all of the energy needed to slow the car down, which certainly not enough to get the car back up to it’s previous speed.
All this to say:
So relying solely on regenerative braking isn’t going to have any meaningful impact on driving range.
Source
I think you should re-read your source. as it says this…
And your quote is out of context.
Consider that most fuel economy is lost when the car is accelerating, having a system that captures 90% of the heat every lost to braking, which can then be used to get the car moving again, would be a huge benefit. That’s why regenerative braking can’t extend range, it instead reduces the impact stopping and starting have on the range of the vehicle.
You aren’t getting the full benefits of a plugin hybrid electric motor if you’re relying on regenerative braking. My source clearly explains this.
You get small efficiency gains that add up over time, but you certainly aren’t seeing a meaningful extension in range over a single trip, and you certainly aren’t seeing the benefits of a plug in electric motor if you rely on regenerative braking. In fact, this was one of the main points made in the OP; phev drivers rely on the ICE and thus don’t achieve the emissions benefits that should come with a phev.
This is true, but the assumption that this means that Hybrids are less efficient than their ICE-only counterparts and have detrimental effects on CO2 emissions is not. The article fails to put into plain numbers the expected CO2 emissions of each vehicle type, and their actual CO2 emissions. A lot of those PHEVs are advertised as having 0 emissions most of the time because you can use the electric only option. Even if people don’t take advantage of that by plugging in the vehicle, the hybrid system is still more efficient (except for some extreme long distance, non-stop scenarios) than a comparable ICE only car. The article does not tell us that hybrids are less efficient than ICE only cars, it tells us that our current methods for testing, advertising and accounting for C02 emissions for PHEVs are not matching real world data. This isn’t actually a new problem, discrepancies with lab data and real world driving data have existed ever since we started testing the fuel economy of cars.