The Definitive Guide To Hybrid & Electric Vehicles
Now, ignore all those 350 MPGon you see in the PHEV adverts. These are utterly impossible in the real world, but it can be very economical if you buy them for the right reasons. The car manufacturers have fiddled the figures once again on the government’s testing. This time for miles per gallon. Remember dieselgate? That fiddled emission figures? These fiddle MPG figures. Why does the government allow this? where we explain how they can claim these figures and even stranger, how you could actually get even more miles to your gallon. I’m Dave and I’m diving into what hybrids are and what they most definitely are not. Each month, we travel the country as we debunk the myths, sharing real stories and practical advice for those not wanting to be left behind by the UK’s EV Transition 2030. Subscribe now to join our journey. Now, today we’ll look at the massive rise in PHEV sales sweeping the country and the equally rapid decline in hybrids, helping you to understand which is best for you. Now, a quick look at what a hybrid actually is will immediately show how baffling this all can be. See, in the good old days, we had petrol or diesel. Life was simple. If you had a petrol car, you put petrol in, end of story. But in the bid to go greener and get more efficient, produce less emissions, the experts worked out every time you break approaching a junction, you shedding kinetic energy, also known as motional movement. And you had to then burn even more energy, petrol, to replace it when you accelerated from the junction. Plus, of course, when you you were also burning petrol when you were stationary at the junction. Now, most motoring is a series of starts and stops. burning then wasting energy. So the hybrid was born and at one point that was it petrol, diesel or hybrid. Now it was developed by many designers decades ago including Porsche and it featured a very small battery and a small electric motor. The car ran normally on petrol or diesel, drove perfectly normally. Can never run just on electric. But this time when the driver break the electric motor was activated as a generator and that not only slowed you down but also produced some electricity which charged up the small battery. And when the driver accelerated the electric motor worked with the petrol engine to help accelerate the car, meaning the petrol engine had slightly less to do. This was just energy recovery. It save fuel and it worked but it never caught on. It was far deer, much more complicated. Few jet drivers could even detect the extra power and the difference in miles per gallon was well nominal. So, the plug-in hybrid was developed with the arrival of the iconic Toyota Prius. Well, probably the main reason the hybrid never caught on was because you could not drive on electric only. The battery and motor were really quite small did help a bit, but it was limited to the small amount of kinetic energy built up while driving. not a lot. But you could not just put in a larger battery and a larger electric motor because there wouldn’t be enough of that kinetic energy to ever fully charge it. So to install a slightly larger battery, it needed to be able to be plugged in. And once you had to plug it in, the battery size could now expand enormously. Now it could drive the car on electric only, but only for relatively short distances. In pre-production trials, the Toyota Prius had actually three batteries plus a larger electric motor. You charged all three up when you plugged in. When you set off, if you drove carefully, you used the first battery. So, you were finally fully electric. When that battery ran out, it disconnected and the second battery took over. When that one was exhausted, it disconnected and the third battery took the load. But that was now a much smaller one. So, the petrol engine fired up and that battery and motor combo acted like a true hybrid, being topped up whenever the car breakded when it accelerated. By myth, this method in the trials, if you use one gallon of petrol, you could cover an impressive 161 mp gallon. But then forever after until the car was plugged in again, the car ran on the petrol engine, assisted only by a little bit of the small hybrid motor and battery. And because the car now carried a useless but very heavy battery, the petrol performance and efficiency were poor. And here I hope you begin to understand the misleading miles per gallon figures they give for PHEVs. If you only ever used one gallon of fuel, you could in the trials achieve 161 miles per gallon. But if you carried on driving more than that 161, the second part of the journey, however long it was, had no ability whatsoever to to to use the two main flat batteries, just a much smaller third one that recharged from braking and partially helped accelerating. Without the ability to use the main batteries, it was effectively just a petrol hybrid that now could never drive electric only and only got a tiny assist from the third battery. Now, in the UK trials, driving in EV only mode, which gave a range of about 12 1/2 miles, accounted for only a third of each demonstration journey. The average trip was 7.3 miles. The maximum was 12.4. The overall fuel consumption was 27% better than the equivalent diesel powered car. Now hold on. It sounds like these figures don’t add up. The range was about 12 mi and the average trip was about 12 mi. But there is more to this story. One more twist. The early Prius electric motor was not powerful enough to drive the car on electric only at 70 mph on the motorway. In reality, it was much much slower than that. In fact, almost every single journey undertaken in the trials resulted in the car driving at some point on part electric and part petrol and on many stages were effectively petrol only. Even on full batteries, it could accelerate away from the lights happily on electric only, but very quickly that was not enough and the petrol engine had to fire up. So, how do you measure the MPG of a modern plug-in hybrid? Well, going to come back to that shortly cuz the hybrid story is another few twists yet. By the way, any vehicle that has a mixture of power sources is by definition a hybrid. So, plug-in hybrid is just a very specific type of hybrid, one with a larger battery that must be plugged in to charge it and can run for short distances on electric only. Originally, that was it. hybrid or PHEV. But then came the manufacturers deliberate attempt to mislead us. We get the mild hybrid. Now this is actually just a hybrid which is with a very much smaller battery and motor and it’s cheaper. Batteries are expensive. But to compensate for that they launched a full hybrid. Mild hybrids are generally incapable of ever driving on electric only. But full hybrids now can often do just a very short stint on electric before reverting to hybrid. Generally, this is when you stop, the petrol engine cuts out and you’re on electric, but as soon as you move a few feet, the petrol engine fires up again. Very limited. So, here’s the catch. Hybrids cannot be charged from plugging in. Otherwise, they’d be called PHEVs, plug-in hybrids. So, while they may have a larger battery and motor, the kinetic energy from breaking is the same. And once again, the deciding factor, the reason we got PHEVs was because hybrids didn’t have enough kinetic energy in normal driving to charge a bigger battery. So the full hybrid is destined to use up most of its electricity fairly quickly. Then in effect, it could become a mild hybrid. But once again, manufacturers cheap because some now allow the petrol engine to recharge the battery. So, you’re buying petrol, you drive using petrol, you charge your batteries using petrol, then you drive on electricity that you use petrol to charge. Have a wild guess what happens to the efficiency of your petrol engine when it’s lugging around a bigger, heavier vehicle because it’s got a bigger, heavier battery and electric motor. And it’s also now recharging your battery. But by now, even that’s probably out of date. Some mild hybrids will soon start to move using electricity only. It is an everchanging world we live in and the manufacturers will invent all sorts of new types of hybrids just to baffle you. I bet most hybrid drivers do not even know which they have. So, we’re getting back now to miles per gallon PHEV. So, first a modern PEV can actually drive much faster in EV only mode. But if you can get one up to 70 mph, uh, driving very, very carefully electric only, the range is then pitifully short. In reality, most PHEVs have a real world EV only range of about 40 to 60 mi. Just a tiny few exceed 80. In reality, the petrol engine is used extensively to offer maximum efficiency. If you only ever cover a journey of a few miles and it’s in slowmoving heavy traffic, in theory, the petrol engine might never fire up. So, as long as you can charge each and every night, you’ll use no petrol at all. The PEV PHEV would be entirely operating as an EV. Here’s your first conundrum. If you have to drive it very carefully to use electric only and you have to charge it up every night, why not just buy a BEV and drive normally and only charge once a week? Oh, but I need the petrol engine for those longer trips, I hear everyone shout. And I ask, what longer trips? According to government source Zap Map, over 90% of all journeys in the UK are less than 100 miles. That’s easily within the range of almost all EVs, including the very cheapest models like the BYYD Dolphin Surf 165 miles. Leap Motor T040 mi in the real world. Familyiz EVs generally exceed 200 250 mi in the real world, while many now exceed 300. Now, I recently posted a video of a road trip I completed in an EV, obviously with 450 miles covered. No problem. That argument, you see, now sounds a little off. Would you buy a significantly bigger and more expensive car than you need just for that one trip each year that exceeds 100 miles? Or if once a year it’d be nice to get the whole extended family into one car for that special day out to the beach. Should you just go ahead and buy a 14-seater miniv? Well, here’s the most common comment we receive from PHEV owners on the channel. I haven’t put in any petrol for months. I love my PHEV. The next most common comment for PHEV drivers is now that I’ve driven my PHEV and understand it better, my next car is going to be a full EV. So, the car can do no more than 80 miles, needs plugging in each and every single night, while a full BEV could do 200, 250 m or more, and needs charging only once a week. Now, they’re coping really well with 50 or 60 miles range. Does anyone understand this conundrum? Yeah. Well, measuring the miles per gallon of a mild hybrid easy. It’s almost the same as a petrol only car. It’s just dearer to buy. Measuring the miles per gallon of a full hybrid is easy. It’s almost the same as a petrol car, only a lot dearer. If you buy a hybrid, you won’t get very much better economy than a full petrol. In fact, you could probably get less. The hybrid will be much heavier than a full petrol only car. If the hybrid’s your thing, I would recommend looking seriously at a full petrol only car that’s still available, it will be cheaper and with the reduced weight, it might be just as efficient. But as I said, definitely it’ll be cheaper. So now we finally arrive at the PHV. You want a PHV and you want to know how many miles per gallon you’ll get. Sorry, there’s no simple answer. It’s too many variables. If you can charge at night and you do so each night and you never drive more than 20 m and all those miles are done at 20 to 30 m an hour, you may never put any petrol in at all. So you have no miles per gallon figure. You will have an increased electricity bill. Now, if you can’t charge your home, only ever do about 20 mi, all at slow speeds, you again may have no petrol bill, so no miles per gallon, but again, you’ll have a much higher electricity bill with public charges. And be honest, are you really going to charge it every single night of public charges? Now, if you commute long distances, mostly on motorways, cannot charge your home, then you’re going to have a high petrol bill, a low mile per gallon, and a high electricity bill. It’s this complexity and uncertainty allows the manufacturers to confuse us with figures like the BMW 330e quoting 353.1 miles per gallon. You can easily see on the spec that it can only ever cover 62 m electric only. Then it runs on full petrol. No petrol engine ever did anything like 353.1 miles per gallon. In fact, the real official figure they quote for a BMW 330e with a flat battery 39.8 8 m per gallon. Those vastly inflated figures are fake. They assume you drive almost all your trips only on battery. You charge each night, but just occasionally, hardly ever. You just need to use a petrol engine for just a few miles. Who drives like that? Love to hear from anyone who genuinely gets 300 m per gallon from their hybrid. What car? Auto car, Parkers, Green Car, Guide, Honest John, dozens of others all suggest the actual range is between 50 and 80 miles combined. It’s rather good, but nowhere near 353.1. If you do regular motorway driving, 100 plus mile distances, you’ll spend most of your time using a petrol engine doing about 39 miles to the gallon. Indeed, I tested a 2-year-old one recently and that had 30 m per gallon showing on this display from new, not 353. You need a lot of reality check. PH EVs are great for those who haven’t yet realized that 90% of UK drivers would be better off with a full battery EV, especially if you live in one of the two-thirds of houses that can offer off- street parking and charging. They’re also great for being the buffer between their old petrol car and their final choice of an EV. It’s like flotation uh bands on your arms when you’re learning to swim. You know, you’re not going to be using them for very long, but they can be a great help to give you the confidence you actually need until you can manage to swim unaded. Your question is, did you learn to swim with flotation bands? Are you one of those the majority who just jumped in the deep end and discovered, “Hey, I can actually swim sort of without them, just not very well.” Either way, you know, you won’t be using armbands for very long. I’m Dave [Music]
Welcome to the definitive guide to hybrid and electric vehicles, where we explore the world of clean energy cars that are revolutionising the way we think about transportation. In this video, we will delve into the differences between hybrid vs electric vehicles, helping you make an informed decision when choosing your next car. With a focus on zero emissions, we will discuss the benefits of electric cars and how they are paving the way for a more sustainable future. Whether you’re looking for a comprehensive EV guide or simply want to learn more about the latest developments in the industry, this video has got you covered. From the basics of hybrid and electric vehicles to the latest advancements in technology, we will cover it all, providing you with a thorough understanding of clean energy cars and their role in reducing our carbon footprint.
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