Thread: Hybrid cars what to look for.

Originally Posted by camenzie

For hybrids, don’t know about PHEVs, I don’t think that’s accurate and hasn’t been my experience. In a hybrid, the electric engine supplements the ICE during open road driving.

Yep - either way you look at it the ICE component is turning and burning the entire time you're open road driving. The claimed fuel savings are mainly in urban areas where you can be moving on battery electric only, that's a mathematical thing as a certain size engine x rpm = that much fuel burned to get the right air/fuel mixture... Can't really get around it. If you aren't mostly doing open road driving (i.e. the taxi scenario in town and crawling along a rank or in and out of airport precincts all the time) then your savings on fuel will be much higher than when the engine is running most of the time.

My direct experience was less than 1L/100Km open road driving between the PHEV and the pure ICE versions of the car, the ICE version cost $20K less and used tyres etc at a slower rate. Servicing costs were comparable. Just on purchase price at current fuel prices, the saving over the PHEV version = about 7 years of petrol (not including tyres etc and based at 15K km's a year).