On paper, Plug-in hybrid cars offer the best of both worlds. — electric power for everyday driving and gasoline power for longer trips — but to get the most out of a PHEV, you have to charge the battery. Toyota RAV4 PrimeFor example, it has an electric-only range of 42 miles, is rated at 94 MPGe, and can travel 600 miles on a single tank of gas. However, when it runs out of electricity, it only gets 38 mpg. So how often do owners charge their PHEVs? As InsideEVs points outWe don’t know because the automakers won’t tell us.
As the article points out, PHEVs are more complex, heavier, and more expensive than traditional hybrids. That makes them a headache to manufacture, and for consumers, it means they’re a waste of money if you don’t charge them. A Toyota Prius Prime costs about $5,000 more than a regular Prius, and is probably worth it if you take advantage of its EV range. If you don’t, it only gets 52 mpg combined compared to the regular Prius’s 57 mpg. So you’re literally wasting money on a car that’s less fuel efficient.
Unfortunately, when InsideEVs reached out to several automakers that sell PHEVs, they declined to share their data. Toyota even admitted that they do collect data, they just don’t want to share it:
While Toyota has data on PHEVs and charging behavior, we are declining the opportunity to provide feedback at this time. There are multiple teams within Toyota that collect and analyze data, and when it comes to collecting and analyzing data, there are many variables involved in things like location, owner behavior, and other mitigating factors. As a result, there is no consensus on the data or how to interpret the data to provide what we feel is the right feedback, so we are holding off for now.
You might think Jeep would be more open-minded than the notoriously conservative Toyota, especially since the brand’s former North American boss Jim Morrison recently claimed that 90 percent of the 50,000 4xe owners surveyed charged their vehicles an average of five times a week. That would be great news, but it’s not quite that simple:
That would represent the highest plug-in rate of any PHEV offered by any manufacturer—even higher than the early adopters of the Chevrolet Volt. But that statistic is also somewhat puzzling, because a Stellantis employee who dug into related questions told us 18 months ago that versions 3 and 4 of the company’s UConnect telematics system don’t collect data on charging behavior.
That means the 2016-2023 Pacifica Hybrid (plug-in) and 2021-2023 Wrangler 4xe and 2022-2023 Grand Cherokee 4xe models that use those systems did not provide plug-in data. We believe UConnect 5 has that capability now, but do those 50,000 owners all have the newer version coming in the 2024 model year? In other words, it’s unclear how we know this claim is true.
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We asked Jeep for more details on the survey methodology, electric mileage, and what data might be collected by different versions of UConnect. Specifically, we wanted to know whether the 90% figure represents ALL 4x drivers or just a subset of those who volunteered to answer the survey, a much less valid methodology than the aggregate data for all 4x vehicles we sought.
Despite multiple emails back and forth, Jeep has not provided any further response or data. The company’s Dianna Gutierrez said they “cannot disclose this information as it is proprietary to the company.”
As for the remaining automakers that InsideEVs surveyed, they either didn’t track charging behavior, had outdated data, or could only provide survey results with small sample sizes. If PHEVs are supposed to be a semi-natural step toward electrification for people who aren’t yet sure they want to go all-electric, you’d think automakers would track and share that data just to brag about how many gallons of gas their PHEVs have saved. Or, maybe owners just don’t plug them in that often and don’t want us to know.
There is so much more to it than we can hope to summarize, so Go to InsideEVs and read the full article.. This article is quite long, but we guarantee it is worth reading because it really delves into the nuances and complexities of the PHEV issue.
