Mary Barra, the General Manager of General Motors, let it slip in a recent interview that multiple studies have exposed an uncomfortable truth about the actual ways people end up driving their plug-in hybrids.
According to her, original projections indicated that PHEV owners would be inclined to make around 84% of all their rides in all-electric mode without firing up the engine. It was a major talking point in the discussion of hybrids as a cleaner and more sustainable type of transports.
In reality, however, it turned out that fully electric rides amounted to as little as 27% of all PHEV rides. Polled drivers explained that charging wasn’t readily available or was otherwise unacceptably slow, so they ended up saving time by just topping up the gas tank and driving gas-only.
Needless to say, this approach doesn’t just eliminate the advantages of hybrid vehicles but goes on to introduce new issues. For one, most internal combustion engines in hybrid vehicles aren’t designed to run without electric support. When forced to do so often, they tend to wear out and require costly maintenance more often than engines in traditional ICE cars. They also tend to produce underwhelming amounts of power and torque on their own, which can be especially frustrating considering that you cannot just leave the heavy battery pack at home.
Based on the research, Barra draws some pretty radical conclusions. According to her, BEVs (battery-electric vehicles) are the only true from of eco-friendly transports. As for the hybrids, they may have been conceived with environmental preservation in mind, but ended up being largely “crutches” on our way to superior automotive technologies.
