The Benefits of PHEVs (Plugin Hybrid Electric Vehicles)

So you have a hybrid, but you’re not satisfied with the warm tingly feeling of being kinder to mother earth you get when driving around in your fuel efficient vehicle?

You want more you say?

Since electric cars aren’t quite ready to hit the roads (unless you’ve got the cash for a Tesla Roadster), your next best option that you can get right now is to convert your current hybrid to a Plugin Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV).

Here are some of the added benefits that PHEV will give you:

1) Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) can get 100 mpg.

That’s right, if you’re going to use your PHEV for trips like your daily commute and you’ll be driving it less than 50 miles per day, you can get your gas mileage up over 100mpg. For long road trips, it will be less, but since most people take short trips on a day to day basis, you’ll be consuming very little gasoline. Some days your gas engine may not even need to turn on at all – which means no gas consumption at all.

2) PHEVs Are Cleaner Than Gasoline Powered Cars

One thing skeptics like to say about plug-ins is that they’re simply transferring the pollution from cars to power plants. While it’s true that PHEVs are transferring the pollution, it’s not an equal tradeoff. Studies show that using electric power in a vehicle results in 67% less greenhouse gases than using gasoline in a car – even when considering that half the power in this country comes from coal. That’s because large powerplants are far more efficient and are far cleaner than a conventional internal combustion engine.

Having a PHEV will give you an even more moral highground to stand on when you tell all your friends they should stop driving their gaz guzzling SUVs and start conserving resources now so their grandkids have some left when they’re older.
3) Get cleaner as they get older.

Only PHEVs and 100% electric vehicles actually get cleaner as they get older due to the fact that the electrical grid gets cleaner every decade. A gasoline powered car gets less efficient as time goes on and becomes dirtier as it gets older.
4) Cheaper To Run And Maintain

While PHEVs and electric vehicles (EVs) cost more money upfront, they are actually cheaper to run and maintain than a regular non hybrid car. For example, if gas is $3/gallon, the very best non hybrid cars will cost 8 cents per mile for gas and gas guzzlers will cost 20 cents or more per mile. A PHEV, on the other hand, will cost only 2-4 cents/mile during short trips. Or if you’d like another way to look at it, when running on the electric engine, you’re getting the equivalent of 75 cent/gallon gas.

5) PHEVs Reduce Our Dependency On Foreign Oil

Since the electric grid only depends on oil for 3% of its power, there’s very little dependence on foreign oil when it comes to generating electricity (about half of our power in the U.S. comes from coal which we have a lot of). It’s been estimated that if everyone drove PHEVs, we’d need 55% less oil and we could eliminate foreign oil completely.

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