Top 5 Advantages of PHEVs – Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles

Have a hybrid, but thinking about taking it to the next level by converting it to a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle?

If so, then this blog post is for you since I’ll be covering the top 5 advantages you’ll get by converting your hybrid car to a PHEV. (The Toytota Prius tends to be the best vehicles for this conversion, btw.)

Not only is this conversion more environmentally friendly, it’s going to help you save some green in another sense – some cold hard cash.

So here they are the Top 5 Advantages of PHEVs

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.

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 typical 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 Dependency On Foreign Oil

Since PHEVs run on entirely on batteries until the gas engine is needed, they end up requiring substantially less gasoline to run, especially during your daily commute or when your’e running errands around town. The power that runs your car coming from the power grid doesn’t depend on foreign oil – only 3% of electricy in the United States comes from oil. (About half comes from coal of which the United States has plenty 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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