The main disadvantages of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles

With the recent rises in petrol price and the fact that more and more countries depend on the oil from the Middle East, time has come to look forward towards alternative ways of powering our vehicles. The internal combustion engine has been continuously improved over the last one hundred years and currently has only two major flaws: the cost of fuel and the greenhouse gases emissions, but because they are major issues nowadays, people have started to think of purchasing hybrid vehicles. Even if Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles seem to be the most accessible solution, at least theoretically, they still face a lot of problems waiting to be somehow solved in order to become a feasible alternative to ICE vehicles.

First of all, the lack of existing infrastructure can be a real problem because PHEVs offer only a limited range they can travel before needing to be recharged, so people will need the possibility to recharge them at work for example. This leads to another issue developers are confronting with, the fact that people will need to recharge the batteries during the day and not during off-peak periods as they thought it should be, meaning that the electric grid can get even more solicited. Batteries remain one of the biggest obstacles producers are facing at the moment, because of their low capacity, high production costs, wear out in time and overheating. On top of this, along with the electric motor, they occupy space and make a vehicle weight more, with an immediate effect on its performances. But the main disadvantage of a Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle is that people have to pay up to ten thousand more for a vehicle equipped with this technology and most of them still think it isn't worth it. The PHEV technology comes with a few disadvantages that have to be overcome in the following years in order to increase the people's demand for hybrid vehicles and start mass production. If we take a look on the effects current vehicles have on the planet, we realize that all these issues are minor compared to the ones we are confronting today.