Fact and Fiction: THE HYBRID LIE

Hybrid cars are now a dumb idea. They briefly had a place, back in the 1990s, in demonstrating electric technology in a very limited form, but have no place in the world today and should be banned along with gas cars as soon as possible.

Why this apparently extreme view? The hybrid car is complex, heavy, and only marginally more efficient than a polluting gas equivalent. With some hybrids you plug them in (PHEVs), others you don’t (HEVs). Non-plug-in hybrids are the dumbest of all. The hybrid car came into existence to meet increasingly stringent emission standards, and high gas prices.

From a clean air and climate perspective, buying a hybrid car versus a gas car is like a heavy smoker deciding to quit by going from 20 a day to just 18, the real benefit is minimal. Whenever I take this strong line on hybrid cars, I immediately get a pushback that goes something like “but they are still better than gas, and better than doing nothing at all!”

Yes, I agree, they are slightly better than gas when it comes to air pollution and our climate and they proved interesting for a decade or more, but their time is now at an end.

Along with the internal combustion bans planned by many countries, from the mid-2020s onwards, hybrids are also slated to be banned, however typically these bans kick in five years after ICE bans. This is because there is a misbelief that retaining hybrid cars longer is still better for us. It's the opposite. I would argue hybrids should be banned today. The reason I propose such a draconian measure is because hybrid cars are slowing the transition to zero-emission fully electric cars. This is due to two main reasons, number one they are an unnecessary false distraction for consumers, and number two, they are blocking infrastructure which should only be used for fully electric cars.

I'll start with the first reason. Today there is an increasingly broad variety of pure electric cars on the market, capable of catering for almost every need. Range is not really an issue for 90% of use cases and range limitations of electric cars are often exaggerated deliberately by internal combustion car makers. The hybrid is therefore used as a placebo, a fake product to make the consumer feel more at ease.

By playing on people’s fears about the range of electric cars, even if they don't want to continue driving a polluting car, the hybrid appears to have the answer to both. You will never have to worry about running out of range, because you still have an internal combustion engine in a hybrid car, and you can feel good about yourself because you reduced your emissions, right? Wrong.

Research has shown the pollution and climate benefit impact from hybrid cars is negligible. Indeed, it has been suggested that the existence of hybrid cars is actually encouraging people to buy bigger-engined machines, safe in the knowledge that a tiny proportion of their miles will be covered by electric propulsion. With a plug-in hybrid, PHEV, you charge usually a very small battery that gives limited range, typically less than 50 kilometres on electric, the rest of the time you're on gasoline. So, 50 clean kilometres is better than nothing at all, right? Well not really, because hybrid cars are

using electricity to carry around an internal combustion engine and its fuel. The only slight gain is the small amount of charging from regenerative braking.

The reality is, for 90% of use cases there is nothing stopping somebody going for a full electric car and the hybrid option is just an unnecessary distraction that offers no real climate benefit at all. Indeed, it has become quite common for people to state that they will try hybrid first before going full electric due to the irrational fear of range of electric cars. Within weeks of adoption, 97% of people switching to electric cars are used to it and state they would never go back. The hybrid is therefore delaying people's purchasing decision to switch to full electric.

The second reason is closer to my own heart and drives me nuts. I’m going to illustrate it with just one of hundreds of examples of how hybrids **** me off. 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, they further slow 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. There is virtually no benefit, economical or environmental.

Makers of hybrid cars came under scrutiny in 2020 for exaggerating the climate savings of their vehicles. It was found for example the BMW X5, Volvo XC60 and Mitsubishi Outlander emitted between 28% and 89% more CO2 than advertised, according to independent watchdog tests performed by TransportandEnvironment.org. There have even been suggestions that Europe could be heading for a new Dieselgate, with question marks placed against well-known hybrid brands and the 2020/2021 EU CO2 emission standards. Tests conducted by the German, Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI and the non-profit research organisation International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) found that the real-world emissions of PHEV are between two and even four times greater than advertised.

The use of ‘self-charging hybrid’ terminology in advertising is ridiculous and needs to be banned, as in Norway, while the use of public charging infrastructure for heavily polluting SUV hybrids needs to also be banned and made only available to fully electric vehicles.

FICTION: Hybrid cars are better for the environment, and a good necessary transition to electric cars.

FACT: Hybrids offer just a tiny, inconsequential positive climate impact. Hybrid cars are slowing the transition to full EVs by misleading consumers and blocking the public charging infrastructure necessary for full battery-electric cars. Hybrid car technology is now irrelevant.