Falling panel prices lead to global solar boom, except for the US

Plug-in hybrids are EVs that have a gas engine in place of a larger battery. It means you're acquiring the knowhow and manufacturing capacity to build electric motors and batteries. If the market shifts you just take the engine out and put more batteries in its place, or offer that as a trim level in the places that want it.

PHEVs are universally bad EVs. Terrible capacity, slow / low power charging infrastructure, minimal use of electric engines at higher speeds. They are essentially a lie to get green subsidies & tax breaks, achieving only ~19% less emissions than their gas equivalents in the real world [1]

They don't have to be bad EVs, you could theoretically make one with a good EV powertrain, but then it would likely be more expensive than a pure EV. And battery prices drop substantially every year, and ranges are increasing fast.

They're a dead end.

(1) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...

> Terrible capacity, slow / low power charging infrastructure

These are the things they make irrelevant because they're hybrids. It doesn't matter if it has a short range or takes 8 hours to charge because you charge it once a day overnight or while you're at work, which is enough for 98% of the days because the range is still double the average commute, and then the other 2% of the time you put gas in it.

> minimal use of electric engines at higher speeds

There are hybrids that can do 85 MPH before starting the gasoline engine.

> you could theoretically make one with a good EV powertrain, but then it would likely be more expensive than a pure EV

You could make a hybrid that could do 200 MPH in electric mode and the main thing you would have to change is use a bigger electric motor, which isn't the expensive part. But nobody really needs it to do that.

> And battery prices drop substantially every year

Do they get substantially lighter though? Because that's the expensive part. A hybrid can have a battery which is 25% the size and then spend less than half the saved weight on the ICE powertrain. Then it's lighter, which not only increases the number of miles per kWh, it means you don't need such heavy duty propulsion, suspension, brakes, etc., which saves even more weight and cost.

> These are the things they make irrelevant because they're hybrids. It doesn't matter if it has a short range or takes 8 hours to charge because you charge it once a day overnight or while you're at work, which is enough for 98% of the days because the range is still double the average commute, and then the other 2% of the time you put gas in it.

Did you read the link? It absolutely does matter. The pathetic ev system in hybrids mean they save -19% of gas in the real world. Aka, basically nothing. Approximately no-one is doing 98/2 on electric.

Semi-solid states with 500+ mile range are already shipping in china, the remaining niche of hybrids is dying fast.

There are two obvious reasons for that. One is they're testing the hybrids that can't do highway speeds in electric mode, but that's the easy one. Stop making those. All it needs is a bigger electric motor and electric motors aren't that expensive.

The other is that it's a plug-in hybrid but that doesn't mean much unless you actually plug it in. A lot of people are presumably buying them without installing a charging port and then just running them on gas all the time. But that's not the car's fault. You make your choices and then the money comes out of your own wallet.

What are you even arguing?

These are the hybrid cars that are getting built, and this is the way people drive them. Yes the cars could theoretically be made different, but they arent today and they wont be in future. Yes people could theoretically use them differently, but they aren’t today and they wont.

The data is in. They are a bad solution for real people in the real world today. Saying “oh if they were just built different and people used them differently “ is … not a good argument. Let’s wait and see whether those two things change before EVs completely obsolete them in few short years.

> These are the hybrid cars that are getting built

Both types are being built. You can buy whichever one you want.

> this is the way people drive them

This is the way people from some sample at a particular time and place drive them. If you buy one you can drive it however you want, so what other people do isn't particularly relevant.

Moreover, they're presumably running them on gas because there wasn't convenient charging infrastructure available to them, but that's the same problem EVs have so if you change that then you also change the proportion of the time that plugin-in hybrids run on electricity.

I provided real world data. You keep providing what if’s and hypotheticals about cars that don’t exist and driving habits people don’t have. I give up - we’ll find out in 5 years, we’ll see how successful the hybrid market is. I’d put good money that they’re irrelevant by then.

"Real world data" on something driven by human behavior is basically a random number generator. People at different times and places have different preferences, laws and the economy change or are different in different countries, etc.

As an obvious example, if a place has high electricity prices, like say central Europe after Germany shut down all their nuclear power plants and stopped being able to buy Russian natural gas, then people with a car that can run on either gasoline or electricity are going to more often choose the former because the latter is more expensive. But "real world data" from the time and place where that's happening is irrelevant to some other place or time where the cost of electricity is lower.

And that's just one factor.