PITY the poor petrol-electric hybrid. You know – the vehicle that is electrified but doesn’t need to be plugged-in to be charged. Yeah that’s the one – the vehicle that’s currently selling like the proverbial hot cakes in New Zealand.
So why pity the hybrid? Its because as a vehicle type, it’s stuck in a sort of environmental no-man’s land.
On one hand, the Government refuses to recognise them. Its Ministry of Transport says hybrids cannot be considered electric vehicles because their batteries cannot be charged from an external electric source. So hybrids are not included in Government statistics on the size of this country’s EV fleet.
But on the other hand, the motor industry does recognise them. The Motor Industry Association says the Government view is too narrow and ignores technologies which are achieving fuel consumption the equivalent or better than plug-in hybrids.
That includes hydrogen by the way, because vehicles carrying that new technology can’t be plugged-in either, despite the fact the so-called ‘green’ hydrogen is 100 per cent emissions-free.
But through all of this, the hybrid itself probably doesn’t care. That’s because it is selling in far greater numbers than EVs. Last month, for example, 1045 hybrids were registered new in New Zealand.
As an aside, within that statistic there’s another statistic that dramatically underlines the current popularity of hybrids. Of those 1045 registrations, 641 of them were Toyota RAV4 hybrids – which represented 80.5 per cent of all RAV4s registered last month.