EDIT clarifications:

  • the article is from the European Commission. This thing comes from a serious study based on hard facts and data.
  • Check this comment by @wooster@startrek.website, who reported the data.
  • Note that plugin hybrids are still better than pure ice, but they were expected to be much better.

It’s not a typo: plug-in hybrids are used, in real word cases, with ICE much more than anticipated.

In the EU, fuel consumption monitoring devices are required on new cars. They studied over 10% of all cars sold in 2021 and turns out they use way more fuel, and generate way more CO2, than anybody thought.

The gap means that CO2 emissions reduction objectives from transport will be more difficult to reach.

Thruth is, we need less cars, not “better” cars.

  • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    phev drivers rely on the ICE and thus don’t achieve the emissions benefits that should come with a phev.

    This is true, but the assumption that this means that Hybrids are less efficient than their ICE-only counterparts and have detrimental effects on CO2 emissions is not. The article fails to put into plain numbers the expected CO2 emissions of each vehicle type, and their actual CO2 emissions. A lot of those PHEVs are advertised as having 0 emissions most of the time because you can use the electric only option. Even if people don’t take advantage of that by plugging in the vehicle, the hybrid system is still more efficient (except for some extreme long distance, non-stop scenarios) than a comparable ICE only car. The article does not tell us that hybrids are less efficient than ICE only cars, it tells us that our current methods for testing, advertising and accounting for C02 emissions for PHEVs are not matching real world data. This isn’t actually a new problem, discrepancies with lab data and real world driving data have existed ever since we started testing the fuel economy of cars.