Getting Over the Plug-in Hybrid Hump
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In recent months, we’ve seen the automotive industry pivot away from a focus on battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Now, the EV movement faces a unique set of challenges that could come after the rise of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). If people get hooked on PHEVs, we could find ourselves having a tough time getting car buyers to want to move on from “the best of both worlds.” In this article, I want to talk about what some of those challenges are and what we can do to get past them.
The Challenges PHEV Dominance Could Pose
First, we need to talk about infrastructure. The cold hard fact is that the federal government simply can’t fund all of the charging stations we’d need for everyone to be able to go electric. The government theoretically could afford it, but the kind of spending that would be needed would fail to get past political hurdles.
The funding for EV charging stations in the Infrastructure Bill wasn’t meant to solve the problem entirely. It was meant to break the Catch-22 where people don’t want EVs because there aren’t enough charging stations, allowing more early mainstream adoption, which in turn would lead to more demand for charging stations. This, it was thought, would lead to more private investment to meet the new demand.
In other words, the Biden folks don’t want to fuel the car. They only want to jump-start it. If the next generation of mainstream electrified vehicles doesn’t need the infrastructure, that could cause the growth of EV infrastructure and BEVs to sputter.
Another problem is that the industry is now incentivized to cut back on EVs. The EV tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act require that the battery materials come from a country that’s friendly to the United States in the geopolitical realm. Because much of the mineral and battery supply comes from China at present, making enough compliant vehicles for everyone is tough. This puts PHEVs (which need far fewer battery cells) in a much better position to take advantage of those tax credits.
If PHEVs become popular, it could also slow down innovation in battery technology and other EV-specific technologies. With PHEVs, there’s just a lot less urgency to solve issues like range anxiety or charging speed since the ICE acts as a backup. This could lead to a technological plateau where improvements in EV technology might not be as rapid, affecting the long-term competitiveness of EVs against traditional vehicles.
Another problem is supply chain complexity. The automotive supply chain for PHEVs is more complex than for either pure EVs or traditional vehicles, because PHEVs need both ICE parts and EV parts, even if they often need a lower quantity of each. As we’ve often seen, entrenched interested are hard to beat in the political realm. Suppliers and plants making the ICE parts for PHEVs aren’t going to be happy if later they’re told to go away.
Finally (and probably most importantly), buyers’ feelings toward PHEVs could affect the broader adoption of EVs later. If PHEVs are seen as a solution to range anxiety or as a more practical choice, the psychological barrier to fully transitioning to EVs might remain just as high as it is today for many buyers. Consumers might grow accustomed to the convenience of a fallback ICE, making the leap to full electric seem less appealing and even less necessary.
How Do We Get Over This?
If plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) become a popular choice, the electric vehicle (EV) industry could face several challenges, primarily due to consumer preference, infrastructure demands, and market dynamics. Here’s how the industry and regulators might strategize to navigate these challenges:
The biggest thing North American, European, and geopolitically-aligned Asian countries could do to prepare for the future is do what the Chinese did: invest in battery technology and production. State capitalism might be a bad way to do business, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. To compete and retain control of key industries, other countries will likely need to do the same thing.
EV charging infrastructure is another area that’s probably going to require more investment than we had hoped. Europe seems to already be doing pretty good at this, but the United States is crapping its pants. It always takes time for any government program to do anything, but the slow roll of the NEVI program has been a disgrace for EVs. So, this isn’t just a matter of putting more money into it, but being a lot smarter about getting stations built quickly.
There will also need to come a time when PHEVs stop getting the tax credit. They are usually better than a regular hybrid and are almost always better than a straight gas car, so we don’t want to pull that rug out too soon or too quickly. But, once there’s a good critical mass of PHEVs and once materials and infrastructure are in a better place, it will be time to make them BEV only.
The whole burden for going from PHEV to BEV in the future can’t fall on government, though. Industry, activists, and EV fans need to come up with more ways to contribute to moving past PHEVs.
I can’t cover them all here, but one way I plan to keep contributing is by ensuring that EV road trip content keeps coming. Sure, all of the fans know that you can road trip in an EV, but if people buy PHEVs, it’s easy to forget that EVs can still do it. The myth will need to be busted over and over and over if we’re going to get past the PHEV hump.
Industry needs to also consider that the global industry isn’t doing the PHEV thing. Instead of resting on their laurels and getting comfortable with PHEVs, automakers need to keep working to push the state of the art forward. This can reduce everything from charging anxiety to range anxiety to the remaining durability issues some manufacturers face.
If we can do all of this, we can likely get past the PHEV phase without much trouble. But, if we assume that EVs will automatically beat PHEVs, we’ll be sorely disappointed.
Featured image: two Chevy Volts at a charging station. Image by Jennifer Sensiba.
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