What’s even better is less cars and more alternative means of travel. This comes in the form of biking, especially e-bikes, public transport, especially a large variety to serve various needs, and finally better zoning to create walkable neighborhoods and promote movement for going from place to place.

For the remaining trips not covered by the above, aka the exception case, using cars. Most car trips can even be PHEV and our non-freight transportation emissions would be substantially lower.

Even in the worst case scenario of everyone having to drive, PHEVs are a much better option as we transition to a fully society EV. I’m disappointed that most car manufacturers are trying to go through this all or nothing mindset of jumping directly from Gas to EV. A large portion of the population drives less than 50miles a day so a PHEV with ~50miles or range would make a huge dent in our emissions.

Complexity is often cited as the reason for not adopting PHEV, and I think that’s an easy scapegoat, as humans we’ve solved many complex at scale, if we can build massive fleets of Priuses over decades, why can’t we build more of them with a slightly larger battery.

I’ve also heard the economics don’t work out argument against PHEV, and we could say the same thing about EVs, they’re cool now but can we manufacture, and recycle enough batteries to keep up with demand?

EVs are heavy, Can we maintain road infrastructure that was built using fuel consumption taxes, for lighter weight cars?

Taking these concerns into consideration, I feel that PHEVs are awesome and we should all demand more of them, they are lighter than EVs, cause significantly less emissions and are a wonderful bridge technology that improves the car trips that we do need to take.