So we recently bought a new minivan (yes...I'm kinda a wild child, I know) that is a plug-in hybrid. What is the difference between this and a regular hybrid? Well, you plug it in, just like a battery car, and it has a certain range on the battery power alone. We got the Chrysler Pacifica, which has a range of 33 miles on the battery charge.
My biggest beef with full-on battery vehicles is they just aren't energy efficient. A regular gas-powered car will reliably get a certain distance and then fill it up in 5 minutes and hit the road again. A full battery-powered vehicle can vary widely and once it's empty of juice, you have to wait hours to get going again, meaning you still need another vehicle for longer drives. It's never been an issue of power, electric actually provides more efficient power than gas.
So we have this plug-in hybrid minivan now and just driving around town we use almost solely battery power. We put over 500 miles on it with only using a quarter of a tank of gas and some of that was because is missed plugging it in the first night. We are on track to get around 2,000 miles on a tank of gas...yes, 2K miles and we are pulling about 150 mpg.
Now, for longer drives it quickly goes to regular hybrid mode as you are doing straight pushing on the gas and it still gets around 33 mpg, which is great for a minivan. We estimated that we are using about $50/month more in our electric bill but saving $250-$275/month on gas. We are at 21 days of ownership, and around 650 miles and have only used a little over a quarter of a tank, meaning we'll go months without filling up at this rate we'll go over 2 months without filling up.
I think this is actually the real future of cars and I'm really enjoying it and hope to see this form of hybrid spread across all platforms and it will really knock down emissions from vehicles. Maybe I'm a big dork for being all stoked about this but here I am.
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