The hype for hybrid cars will not last
I am reading this short piece and wondering how many people will commit to full electric? I do not see this occurring for a while. The batteries just do not last long enough for many people to accept electric vehicles today. Hybrids are going to be around for a while till the technology catches up.
I am thinking 5 years out before there is a battery which will handle a large load for a long period of time before needing recharge. How fast can you recharge? Then how much of the battery can be recharged over time as they do lose capacity.
I think I will wait. There are some people here who do have EVs.
The Economist
The car industry’s effort to decarbonize revolves around replacing petrol with batteries. A growing number of customers want both. Buyers who cannot afford a fully electric car, or worry about the availability of charging points, are turning to plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), sales of which are rocketing. But the hype for hybrids may prove to be short-lived.
Worldwide sales of cars running purely on batteries (BEVs) were more than double those of PHEVs last year. But the gap has been rapidly closing. Sales of PHEVs were up by almost 50%, year on year, in the first seven months of 2024, compared with just 8% for BEVs, according to estimates from Bernstein, a broke
The car industry’s effort to decarbonize revolves around replacing petrol with batteries. A growing number of customers want both. Buyers who cannot afford a fully electric car, or worry about the availability of charging points, are turning to plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), sales of which are rocketing. But the hype for hybrids may prove to be short-lived.
Worldwide sales of cars running purely on batteries (BEVs) were more than double those of PHEVs last year. But the gap has been rapidly closing. Sales of PHEVs were up by almost 50%, year on year, in the first seven months of 2024, compared with just 8% for BEVs, according to estimates from Bernstein, a broker.
Carmakers have been cooling on BEVs and warming to hybrids. This month Volvo backtracked on its commitment to go all-electric by 2030. It now says BEVs and PHEVs will together account for 90% of its sales by the end of the decade. Last month Ford announced that it was abandoning plans to make a large fully electric suv, opting instead for hybrid power. Hyundai is doubling its range of hybrids from seven to 14 models. Volkswagen, too, has pledged to increase investments in hybrids as it rethinks its plans for bevs.
Consumers are turning to hybrids partly because they are cheap. The big batteries required to run fully electric vehicles make them far more expensive than petrol cars. That is a problem when it comes to selling to the mass market; most buyers “will not pay a premium”, says Jim Farley, the boss of Ford. Plug-in hybrids, by contrast, run on much smaller batteries: they typically have a 20-kilowatt-hour unit, around a third of the size of those in BEVs. As a consequence, PHEVs are only a little more expensive than petrol-powered cars, and cost less to run. Although hybrids can typically travel only around 40 miles on their batteries, the option of using petrol avoids the anxiety many drivers of bevs have about running out of charge.
For their part, carmakers are fond of hybrids because they are usually as profitable as petrol-powered cars, in contrast to BEVs, many of which are loss-making. Smaller batteries mean lower production costs. Hybrids also allow legacy carmakers to draw more on their existing expertise and supply chains.
The fashion for hybrids, however, may prove to be fleeting. Rules in California, adopted by 16 other American states, stipulate that by 2035 only 20% of the new vehicles sold by carmakers can be plug-in hybrids; the remainder must be fully electric. The EU plans to slam the brakes on even harder: the bloc will ban the sale of all cars that run on petrol engines, including hybrids, by 2035.
Hybrids may already be less competitive by then. Battery prices have been falling, and will fall further as production expands and new chemistries are developed. Carmakers such as Renault have plans to roll out BEV models that cost significantly less than their current offerings, spurred on by Chinese competition. Charging networks are continuing to expand.
Bernstein predicts that phevs will capture a growing share of the car market until around 2030, but that sales will then stabilise and eventually decline as those of BEVs speed up (see chart). Hybrids are “winning now, but bevs will win eventually”, reckons Patrick Hummel of ubs, a bank. Xavier Smith of AlphaSense, a consultancy, thinks the obsession carmakers currently have with hybrids will prove short-sighted. Those that lose focus on electrification could soon fall behind. ■
I love prophecies, as long as I get to live long enough to see them tested.
Meanwhile, when my wife’s 21-year-old Pontiac Vibe finally croaks, we’re thinking about how to replace it. I’d be fine with a hybrid, but it’s her car, her choice. I doubt she’ll choose a BEV, though.
Right now, BEVs in RI run mostly on natural gas. BEVs in Missouri run mostly on coal. In AZ, >50% of electricity is generated either by natural gas or coal. Until electricity generation in the US switches to nuclear and renewables, BEVs are mostly just swapping one form of carbon for another.
Precisely, sir.
Relatively green hydrogen production is possible with the addition of breeder reactors and secure nuclear material transport since breeder reactors can be used to vastly reduce waste from nuclear power generation via the recycling of spent fuel. Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but it is a far reach from capitalism that requires minimal public sector limits over private profits. If government is the problem and privatization is the cure, then nuclear power recycling is out and so is hydrogen powered transportation. Private profits only want government to protect their property rights and clean up their mess. Public run water and sewer are one thing, but public run banking and power generation are quite another. The corporate way is for the public to bear all the risks and the private owners to take all the profits.
IOW, maybe a hybrid for our household in the next few years, but definitely not a BEV, which will neither make us unique nor green. Advantage climate change. Sorry glaciers and polar bears.
This EV owner has drawn the conclusion it is pointless to share experience
@Ten,
I wouldn’t say it’s pointless, I’d say it’s anecdotal. The plural of anecdote isn’t data. Speaking for myself, I’m more interested in data. YMMV.
Ten Bears:
Here in AZ, people like big and or noisy.
If you can’t be both than be one or the other. You can always be bigger. just get bigger tires. If you can’t be big just get a noisy muffler. Either way, people may notice you. Or just ignore the noise and the sight. Must be a lot of instances where dad or mom did not pay enough attention to them. So, they foist their psychological issues on the public to get the attention they need.
People try to live outside of the laws or the rules. If you have systems on your vehicle to eliminate air contamination and it requires a tenth of a gallon more of fuel, lets eliminate them, save on the fuel, and we can still go fast. Forgot, we can blow fumes out of our exhaust or soot so we notice.
The logic of the human mind escapes me at times.
Does going a bit faster get you there that much sooner? Will stopping for a light or stop sign cause you to be late? No, its all a matter of “I.”
hm, the OEMs and some ICEV proponents are happy to push Hybrids just to keep from having to sell/service BEV. cause here is the del, hybrids are more complicated than BEV or ICEV, since they have both propulsion systems in them, which will save the dealers from losing service revenues and profits from same, Hybrids being more complex than both, will need more service during the life. which adds more cost to owners. as it and ICEV have to buy fuel (which is going to get more and more expensive as time goes on). now if one looks at jus OEM websites one might think that ICV will be lots cheaper, but they arent. thanks the mandatory dealership sales system in the US, dealers order all the vehicles in their inventory. OEMs can try to encourage them to buy certain vehicles, but thats about it. so what you find on dealers (mostly influenced by pandemic sales experience). so dealers ordered no low-cost versions of vehicles they order, so you get at best mid level trims, so for example what you will see on a Ford lot, is lots F150, most being mid trim XLT, supercrews (4 door pickups), and almost all will have 4wd (whether its wanted or needed), price of those tend to be upper %70,000 range, if not higher. then there are higher and specialty versions that cost a lot more. and we can blame the OEMs for how they only offered the BEV truck in super crew only, 4wd only, lowest trim is the XLT. and it might be 10,000 more than some of the ICEV versions. and one wonders how the pandemic impacted auto sales and vehicle ordering. well the pandemic caused a huge crash in the supply chain, so parts and materials were in short supply, making it hard for OEMs to make any type of vehicle. so dealers lots had limited supply of vehicles to sell. suspect they learned that the higher priced vehicles had higher profits too (though they did pad the price a bit adding market adjustments of up to the MSRP for the vehicle and sometimes more than that, along with lots of other add ons. since supply so short, dealers could and didnt care if customer a bought, they could wait till another customer showed and sell it to them). even used vehicle prices skyrocketed, in some cases 20 year old vehicles were selling at their original MSRP. now one might wonder why the finance companies financed them, since the assets werent worth what the loan was (loan to asset value was inverted) but they did. and paid the price later when so many were repossed, causing huge losses. had the finance companies held the line (they dont have to fund the loans after all) but they didnt. now the finance companies have stopped writing auto loans, so dealers have fewer finance companies to get funding. and dealers have lots of vehicles on their lots (and are running out of places for vehicles on their lots (when we take a trip i note that all of the domestic have to add more lots to store vehicles and almost all are ICEV. and some foreign have either lots of vehicles like domestics others they still have little inventory on hand ). OEMs are also having issues, since dealers order only mid range vehicles, they take more parts and labor to build and ship, and they are having to offer rebates to get vehicles sold at dealers. which leads to more production and sales for them. oh and MSRP for many vehicles were cut to improve sales. while BEV sales are still increasing, they just arent doing so at the rate they did before. some of that is because Tesla sales are falling and down. and other OEMs are taking up some of those Tesla sales losses, but they cant in most cases. so wat we have are Hybrids that seem to be doing well, and BEV that arent growing as fast as before but still growing, and ICEV stalling
I have an EV. It is great for around town, which is most of my driving. I can afford two cars so I have an ICE for longer trips. I have not tried to learn how to make longer trips with my EV. (It is a 2014 Leaf, so it only has about a 50 mile range.)
I would not try to sell someone from rural Oregon on EVs, but I know many happy EV owners living in the city. (They too can afford two cars).
When I was in manufacturing no one knew what we would be building on our production lines past about 18 months. I predict that EVs will catch on rapidly after some tipping point that involves motels deciding it is worth providing charging stations. For a couple of years the business in installing chargers will boom. But that could be 2027 or 2031; I don’t know that any more than I knew which ink jet cartridges we would be building beyond two years.
@Arne,
My track record in prophecy is mixed. On our several trips between St. Louis and the East coast before and during our big move, we did stay at hotels that did have EV chargers, but also with some that didn’t. But being literate, I can read that charging stations are still few and far between in the American midwest and west. Will that change? Possibly. Do I want to be on the bleeding edge of that change? Uh, no.
I look at that forecast and if BEV really can track the line through 2035, I think the model may underestimate the reduction in hybrids. If 2050 finds hybrids at 10%, I’d bet the remaining ICE/BEV split is notably heavier ICE than shown. Basically I think hybrids are driven by anxiety about the alternatives and those vehicle anxieties are more about BEV than ICE. US perspective: it’s a tough position for manufacturers right now. Lots of laws and rules tell them they need to go EV very soon, but the actual commitment to all those laws and rules could contract or vanish pretty abruptly if prices and some other issues do not move to meet what buyers think they need. None of know the future, but California “blinking” on their rules is not farfetched.