So Bring on the Plug-In Hybrid Already

Everyone's heard of the Toyota Prius, Honda's Insight, you know, the conventional hybrid vehicles (people spoke of them with hushed awe only a few years ago, and now they are "conventional"). These conventional hybrids, have a gasoline engine for power, and an electric motor to assist at low speeds. The electric motor obtains its power from an onboard gasoline-fired generator. Now there is another way to get power to the batteries that drive the electric motor - why not just plug the car in like with an EV? Now there's an idea! Well, that's what a plugin hybrid is - you put in two kinds of energy: gasoline and electrical. The utility power you get is generated on much better equipment with much lower rates of wastage than you could possibly put in a car. And that brings a great deal of savings on pollution.

But the plugin hybrid is different in one more fundamental way. It doesn't rely on the gasoline engine as much as the regular hybrid does. The gasoline engine only kicks in for highway type speeds. The plugin hybrid aims to cover almost all of your daily commute on electric power. All the hype you have seen in the media about the plugin hybrid is having a little trouble actually getting the concept off the ground. A recent study says that plugin hybrid cars could take billions of dollars in government sponsored incentives to actually get off the ground. And for this reason, manufacturers haven't really gotten involved yet. But that is set to change now. Toyota and General Motors will have plugin hybrid models out in showrooms next year. Plugin Priuses could sell in the thousands in a couple of years, they feel. And in 20 years, there could be 50 million on the roads in America. But that is only if battery technology advances as they expect it to.

And there is the main reason that customers have been slow to take up this kind of vehicle. Battery technology isn't where it needs to be. Manufacturers feel that laptop battery technology is where the action will be. The Tesla electric race car actually uses standard laptop batteries, about 6000 of them to get going. Even so, no one is really confident that they will get cheap enough for everyday people. The battery pack itself could cost about $20,000. Since gasoline is not all that expensive, you would have to drive the electric vehicle 50 years to actually make any actual savings. And no one really wants to take responsibility for the infrastructure either - if you park your vehicle at work, where do you plug in the plugin?

What kind of improvements and mileage can you expect? Well the plugin Prius promises about 134 miles per gallon. And if you plug it in, it would be fully charged in under two hours. The world perhaps is moving away from hybrids towards all electric vehicles. Toyota isn't really doing much about it at the moment; but that could be just because they've invested so much into the regular hybrid.