The efficiency of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles

With the recent increase in carbon dioxide emissions and the rise of fuel price, people are getting more and more interested in cost efficient and non-polluting ways of transport. They have only recently realized that their current vehicles perform quite poorly on fuel efficiency and CO2 emissions and especially the high price of gasoline made them take in to consideration hybrid vehicles. The most interesting and promising of the new technologies is represented by Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles, or PHEV. The problem of efficiency consists of two aspects, the fuel consumption and the carbon dioxide emission level. At current gas prices, a driver using a regular sedan ends up spending about 15 cents for every mile. Using a PHEV, the price he pays drops to about 3 cents per mile. The cost for an electric kilowatt-hour (kWh) is around 9 cents and during the night, when these vehicles are supposed to be recharged, it reaches 2 or 3 cents in some areas where energy producing cannot be stopped. This way, people using a PHEV can run their car at around one quarter of the price paid now for running a regular car.

On top of this, the maintenance costs for a Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle are lower than the ones paid for a car that uses mostly the internal combustion engine because of the electric motor that requires less service time. PHEV are also very efficient when it comes to the level of emissions. It is estimated that a car running on electric power produces over 60 percent lower greenhouse gases than a regular car. Another interesting fact is that, differently from internal combustion engine cars, PHEVs get cleaner as years pass because the methods of obtaining electric energy are constantly improving in a cleaner direction, obtaining much more "green" energy. As you can see, hybrid cars are fuel-efficient and non-polluting but you might wonder if it's worth spending the money on one. Definitely yes, because the initial difference will be quickly covered by the cost of fuel and you can feel proud owning a car that doesn't harm the planet.