Misleading article title.
>In the end, plugins represented 18% share of the overall auto market (with a 13% BEV share alone).
Regardless, this is a happy trend!
>In the end, plugins represented 18% share of the overall auto market (with a 13% BEV share alone).
Regardless, this is a happy trend!
Given the usual intention of "how green are we?", I would suggest counting them as 80% of a "real" EV, for the same reason that I give when the discussion turns to putting PV cells physically on a car[0]: most driving is short trips where this is fine, and the longer trips, while they absolutely exist, are less common.
[0] though with different underlying causes that means this is coincidentally 80% and they may diverge
That said, it is clear to me that the fuel economy one will get with the Prius Prime will depend heavily on the relative frequency of the various trips one takes.
Not bad, definitely a hell of a lot better than the early Prius, but definitely nowhere near BEV efficiencies. I feel like a small-battery BEV is a better proposition for many, especially as pure BEVs have significantly better pure-electric drive-train efficiency than plugins, and less maintenance.
If it can do, say, ~75km pure electric with reasonable climate comforts, then I imagine it should be able to handle a majority of commutes with just home charging and is for all practical purposes a BEV in daily operation.
It gets muddy below that though, requiring either quite limited total daily driving or multiple charge rounds every day...
But even then: if you go 100 km between charging and the battery only lasts half of it, that's still half your fossil fuel that's replaced with a municipal electric grid that is inherently more efficient even when also purely fossil fuelled, and also is being rapidly greened.
Random online sources[0] seem to suggest that the average daily US commute is 41 miles, or 65 km. The median or geometric average might have been better, but that suggests that the "average US citizen" would require 2 charges per day with less than 75 km of battery range.
If you go much shorter than this - say, 20km roundtrip - then you are also getting into bicycle commuting territory, at least outside the US where bikes are given priority in traffic.
[0]: https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-commute-time-statistic...
> But even then: if you go 100 km between charging and the battery only lasts half of it, that's still half your fossil fuel that's replaced with a municipal electric grid that is inherently more efficient even when also purely fossil fuelled, and also is being rapidly greened.
If you divide the all-electric range with battery capacity, the Prius Prism consumes 191 Wh per km in all electric mode, while a Hyundai Ioniq 6 consumes 133 Wh per km - you are paying for the complex hybrid drive-train in electric efficiency. In ICE mode, the same car consumes around 3.5 L per 100 km mixed driving, while fully petrol VW up! uses 2.9 L per 100 km mixed driving - not bad for a gasoline vehicle, but also not amazing. Data from their respective Wikipedia articles.
If you rarely ever need the gasoline engine, sure - then you're just driving a somewhat inefficient BEV with a miniscule battery requiring recharging at least once a day. If the gasoline engine comes on, then you're just driving a gasoline vehicle from that point on with good - but far from the best - fuel efficiency.
Either way, you might still be better off with a small BEV with a tiny battery, like a used Renault Zoe, VW e-UP! or the upcoming VW ID.1. Better efficiency and longer battery-range so you don't have to recharge once or twice every day, and without being the worst of both worlds when they are serviced like is the case for a hybrid.