Why Hybrids Should be Banned Even Now
In my last blog, I started to explain why hybrids are now a dumb idea. As electric cars and charging infrastructure have improved beyond all recognition in the last few years, the whole concept of the hybrid is obsolete and an impediment to the adoption of the full electric option.
Another, more personally annoying reason is the following, and I’m going to illustrate it with just one example of the hundreds of instances I have experienced.
When not charging at home, I will sometimes take advantage of the charging points in shopping centre, hotel, or city centre car parks. I had to drive from Luxembourg to Frankfurt, around 250 kilometers away, to attend a meeting, stay overnight, and needed to get back first thing the next morning. The hotel I picked stated on its website that they had spaces for EV charging, so I booked it.
I knew when I reached Frankfurt that my battery would be almost empty but was safe in the knowledge that I could charge overnight and be ready to make it back the next day without having to do a supercharging stop. I drove into the hotel, with just 20 kilometers left on my battery, only to find that the only two charging spaces were occupied by two giant SUV diesel hybrids. Sure, you can claim they are perfectly entitled to use these charging spots to charge their cars, but all they're adding is around 50 kilometers maximum of clean range, and don't really need to publicly charge, ever.
I needed access to make my trip back the next day as quick as possible, I didn't have a polluting petrol or diesel engine as a backup.
This occurs all over the world daily and it seems to be getting worse. Whenever I drive into a city car park, or shopping centre complex, I invariably find three out of four available charging points occupied by hybrids, and they are almost always large heavy polluting SUVs. When a gas car blocks an EV charging point they're called ‘Gasholes’. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent for a hybrid car driver so I'm going to just call them stupid. By not being able to use charging infrastructure, because it's being blocked unnecessarily by a hybrid, that further slows the uptake and transition to electric cars.
You could definitely argue that any savings made by hybrids has been lost because the engine sizes in hybrids has increased gradually over the past decade. In other words, people are still buying big heavy polluting engines and trying to slightly compensate with a hybrid car. What has made this worse has been numerous tax incentives, encouraging people to purchase a hybrid car. It is almost ridiculous to see high powered brands, even McLaren, selling hybrid cars. It is greenwashing for them and deceit for the customer.
Apart from confusing the customer, delaying a decision to buy an electric car and blocking essential electric car infrastructure, hybrid cars do have a slightly beneficial impact. This is only really the case for pure plug-in hybrids not hybrids which charge the battery by burning fossil fuel. It drives me crazy to listen to radio advertisements from Toyota praising their ‘’self-charging technology.” This is like claiming to have invented the perpetual motion, free energy machine. It’s 100% marketing. The “self-charging” was 90% created by burning gas from the engine to produce electricity This marketing hype fell foul of the Norwegian government in 2020 who instructed Toyota to stop using this false advertising.
The efficiency measure for a hybrid or electric car is best stated in kilowatt hours (kWh) per 100 miles. A kWh is it equivalent to 100 x 100-Watt light bulbs being on for one hour. You pay your electricity bill in kilowatt hours, so it's the easiest way to measure the efficiency you get from a gas car, hybrid, plug-in hybrid or full electric car for a simple comparison. The Tesla Model 3 is the one of the most efficient EVs, rated at 23 kWh per 100 miles, while the heavier Tesla Model S consumes 30 kWh/100 miles.
So how do hybrids compare to these numbers?
It gets a little complex in trying to compare the efficiency rating of a hybrid car because they usually have two ratings, MPG from the normal engines, and kilowatt hours per 100 miles for the electric use.
Looking at a few real-world examples, using 2021 efficiency ratio ratings from the US EPA, I'm going to compare a Tesla Model 3 to an equivalent sized BMW 3 Series Hybrid. The Tesla consumes 23 kilowatt hours per 100 miles, and it has a miles per gallon equivalent rating of 134.
The BMW 3 Series, 330e PHEV, has a miles per gallon equivalent to half the Tesla’s, at 67mpg. Worse still, when in electric mode it consumes double the kilowatts per 100 miles at 51 kWh. That's the efficiency rating, but what about the climate impact? Per mile driven the Tesla produces zero grams of CO2, compared to 192 grams of CO2 for the BMW.
The net benefit over a pure ICE car is irrelevant in climate terms, and indeed considering hybrids could be slowing the transition to electric vehicles they are potentially having a detrimental climate impact.
