If Elon Musk sold plug-in hybrid vehicles, he surely wouldn’t call them plug-in hybrid vehicles, or PHEVs, or anything else that sounds coined by an engineer. Far too clunky. Surely “Cyborgtruck” would offer a more futuristic spin on these marriages of gasoline and batteries?
Even then, it’s hard to escape the underlying clunk. Which suggests the recent upswing in fascination with PHEVs has a limited shelf life — except, perhaps, for one variant suited to the peculiar tastes of the US driver.
Plug-in hybrids sport two drivetrains, one powered by an internal combustion engine and the other by a battery. The latter are larger than for so-called mild hybrids like Toyota Motor Corp.’s original Prius, and can be charged with a plug (hence the name). They can also drive a certain distance purely on electric power after which the engine takes over. The driver gets higher fuel economy and a greenish glow without range anxiety, an important consideration in the US, with its affinity for heavy vehicles and patchy public charging.
While PHEVs constitute only about a fifth of the country’s EV market, sales expanded by 21% in the first half of the year compared with just 3% for battery-only EVs. Ford Motor Co., in particular, is pivoting toward hybrids because it is losing billions on battery EVs. At $139 per kilowatt-hour — the average cost of an EV battery last year — the battery needed to run a large SUV or truck for a decent range runs between $14,000 and $20,000. In comparison, the battery in a typical plug-in hybrid SUV would cost about $3,000 to $4,000.
Yet, the market for these hybrids looks inherently narrow. US PHEVs have the lowest electric range of any major market, about 30 miles on average according to Bloomberg NEF, and the complexity of building twin drivetrains in low numbers — about 160,000 sold in the first half of the year — makes them relatively expensive.
Consider the most popular model in the US, the Jeep Wrangler 4xe. This costs about $9,000 more than its gasoline-only counterpart, even after a $3,750 federal tax credit, and touts an all-electric range of just 21 miles. If those electric miles are driven each day, assuming average distances and energy prices, paying back the extra cost versus the regular Wrangler from fuel savings takes 30 years.
Taking (dubious) advantage of those electric miles means you probably have to install a 240-volt charger at home because recharging even the smaller batteries in PHEVs can take 12 hours or more from a regular outlet. While PHEVs can be viewed as a gateway drug for the electric curious, it’s an expensive drug requiring the user to jump through the same hoop as if they just bought a battery EV. Maybe going for the plug-in hybrid would make sense if battery prices were static, but those are dropping.Needless to say, PHEVs also still produce tailpipe emissions, including carbon dioxide, so carry a societal cost.
Plug-in hybrids have been doing well in China, particularly in regions with sparser public charging. Smaller vehicles and cheaper, and therefore bigger, batteries enable longer electric-only range there; about double that of US plug-in hybrids, on average. One variant, extended range electric vehicles, or EREVs, is doing particularly well, going from virtually nothing to 28% of China’s plug-in hybrid market in 2023, according to Bloomberg NEF. These differ in that only electric motors drive the wheels, so there’s no parallel combustion drivetrain, but they also carry a small gasoline-powered engine as a generator to recharge as you drive.
This is perfectly suited to addressing range anxiety when electrifying pickups — which is why Ford is suddenly enamored with them. Ford’s timing is a little odd, given that EREVs have been around for years (I leased a small one almost a decade ago), but the company’s latest cut to earnings guidance has sharpened its need for electric-ish models that can sell at scale, profitably.
In addition to allaying fears of being stranded, especially when towing, EREVs can use fast chargers, unlike most PHEVs, and their comparatively bigger batteries offer more scope to power tools. Stellantis NV, for example, touts 145 miles of electric-only range for its forthcoming Ramcharger range-extended truck. That is more than enough for most drivers’ daily needs, but the gas tank adds another 545 miles.
If range anxiety is the obstacle to electrifying Trucklandia, then EREVs make more sense than PHEVs. The economics still look challenging. The Ramcharger will reportedly start at about $60,000, or almost $18,000 more than a basic Ram 1500. Even assuming we can net the full $7,500 federal EV tax credit off the Ramcharger’s price, and that it is driven under electric power 100% of the time, then using the same assumptions I had for the Jeep Wrangler, the payback on that premium is 11 years. That drops significantly at higher daily distances — five years if you’re doing 100 miles a day — so EREVs might be particularly attractive for commercial fleets. But you still really need big advances in batteries’ costs and efficiency to crush that gap for heavy trucks.
Which, incidentally, is also what you need for EVs in general and what we are seeing, especially in China. EREVs can serve a transitional role, letting trucks lean on our existing gas-station infrastructure to partly electrify. But the inherent inefficiency of marrying different systems will become more apparent as batteries get more competitive, especially if quantum leaps like solid-state technology eventually go mainstream (something Stellantis is also working on). Expect to see more models like the Ramcharger in the near future. It will be surprising, though, if they’re still rolling off the dealer lots 10 or 20 years from now.
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