Last week, the Biden administration officially announced that American cars are truly going electric.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has finalized a long-gestating rule that would require automakers selling in the U.S. to significantly increase the number of electric vehicles they sell this decade, drastically reducing the country’s carbon emissions. By 2032, more than half of new cars sold must be electric.
Carmakers will have more wiggle room in choosing how to meet the government’s new tailpipe emissions targets thanks to changes from when the rules were first introduced in draft form nearly a year ago. A big and important shift: plug-in hybrids are part of it.
In the draft, car companies can only achieve gradually increasing zero-emission targets by selling more pure electric vehicles. But manufacturers will now be allowed to use plug-in hybrid vehicles to meet the standards after lobbying by automakers and unions, both of whom said the EPA’s proposal was unrealistic.
That means automakers can now meet federal regulations by ensuring that two-thirds of their sales in 2032 are battery electric vehicles, or that battery electric vehicles make up just over half of their sales, with plug-in hybrids accounting for 13 percent. .
Automakers are expected to tap into these types of hybrid vehicles, which are powered primarily by batteries but supplemented by gas engines once the batteries are depleted, as they race to meet the nation’s most ambitious climate goals yet.
You will encounter many such things on the road. But there’s a climate problem with this technology: how emission-free it is depends on driver choice.
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In recent months, executives from manufacturers including Audi, BMW, Chinese electric carmaker BYD, General Motors, Mercedes and Volvo have said “compromise” cars could be the key to getting more cars and customers into the electric transition. springboard. The policy shift could vindicate Toyota, which is betting that customers will flock to gasoline-electric hybrids and plug-in hybrids rather than follow Tesla down the all-electric path.
Globally, sales of plug-in hybrids are growing faster than pure electric vehicles (although this is partly because hybrids have room to climb further). Data provided by market research company BloombergNEF show that sales of plug-in hybrid vehicles increased by 43% between 2022 and 2023, reaching nearly 4.2 million units. Sales of pure electric vehicles increased by 28% during the same period, reaching nearly 9.6 million units.
This technology has some powerful advantages. The average American driver only travels about 30 miles per day, which means most people can get through most of their time using only a plug-in hybrid battery and only use gasoline for longer trips.
Plug-in hybrids also make some automakers less nervous about manufacturing: They’re more expensive to build than pure battery electric cars (the whole two-motor thing), but the technology can sometimes be retrofitted into existing cars in gasoline-powered cars. That means less work, which in the short term is an exciting prospect for an industry that must recalibrate how cars are made and the materials needed for batteries in the coming decades as the industry moves toward electrification. purchasing method.