We Should All Be Driving Hybrids. So What's Wrong With Them?

We should all be driving hybrid cars. They solve so many of the issues facing both pure internal combustion and pure electric vehicles: efficiency, range anxiety, public charging network woes, and urban air quality all stand to be improved with hybrids. But we aren’t driving hybrids. We have long-range, dragstrip-ready EVs, and we have gas cars. What’s wrong with the hybrid?

Image. Hybrid cars have an image problem. They just aren’t cool enough for consumers. This is a failure of marketing as well as a failure of positioning. Before Tesla came along and made EV’s the cool thing to have, the Prius came along and made hybrids particularly un-cool, an uncool from which they have never recovered. Jay Leno famously remarked about rich celebrities per formatively driving the Prius, “Look at this terrible egg I’m driving. Slow, wheezy, tinny. For the environment.” Then, in 2012, an American-made EV that looked like an Aston and went like stink gave the Hollywood elite new, more comfortable ways to show green love, and no celeb has been seen in a hybrid since.

Even the bonkers, hairy-chested McLaren P1 and the Starship Enterprise Porsche 918 Spyder couldn’t bring the term hybrid back from exile in the land of Uber drivers and University of Vermont professors.

But I have a suggestion for the OEM’s who still recognize that, objectively, a hybrid is a better solution for the needs of most consumers than almost any gasoline or EV car on the market today: stop using the H word. Let’s reframe it in a way that combines today’s cool thing with something that people know they want. In fact, I got a comment the other day saying this specific thing about the Ford Lightning I drove recently. At the time I laughed it off, but it got me thinking. It read, “I would like EVs so much more if they were lighter, had more range, and charged themselves.”

How about this: “Self-Charging EV?”

The impossibility of perpetual motion machines aside, I then thought about the excellent Porsche Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid I drove recently. This is an incredibly fast, monstrously impressive touring machine whose own name sucks the wind right out of its spinnaker. But it is literally the vehicle the commenter asked for. It has 35 miles of electric-only range from a 17.9 kWh battery pack which can be replenished either by plugging in, or with the gasoline-powered engine it already has.

Have I not just described a Self-Charging EV?

Let’s say you can start each day with a full charge, because you have a plug at home. Many drives, especially for folks living in semi-urban areas, are under 40 miles per day, meaning for all intents and purposes you have a full-time EV. If you were to drain some of that battery power getting to the freeway, just click one button, and flick the car over to gasoline power. One more button activates “charge” mode, and, imperceptibly to the driver, the car boosts up its own battery pack, adding miles of EV range as you motor along. Now, at the other end of your freeway trip, you exit to surface streets, click back over to EV, and that’s it. Need to take a road trip? No problem, gasoline will let you drive indefinitely. Never take a road trip? Barely use a drop. Hate the public charging network? Never need it. This isn’t a hypothetical - this is exactly how I used the Cayenne e-Hybrid when I had it.