What makes a plug-in hybrid desirable is that, for many people, it has enough range to drive purely on battery power for most daily driving chores. (Note: the next generation Prius Prime due out next year may match or exceed the range of the RAV4 Prime.) The champion on the list above is the Karma GS-6 with 61 miles of range, but the Toyota RAV4 Prime, at 42 miles, is the best available in a car an ordinary person might buy. Most of them have a battery of around 15 kWh, which means they have enough electrical energy to power the car using electricity only for 20 miles or more.

While most are designed and built to be very efficient, they still have an exhaust pipe and still leave a trail of carbon dioxide in their wake at all times.Ī plug-in hybrid can be recharged from an electrical outlet. All the energy supplied to the battery comes from burning gasoline. Typically, the battery and motor have no effect when the car is traveling at a constant speed, such as on the highway.Ī hybrid car has no place to plug in.

The benefits are somewhat better fuel economy in stop and go driving.

Usually when you take your foot off the gas, the motor becomes a generator and sends some electricity back to the battery. It usually has a small battery (1.31 kWh in the current Prius) and an electric motor that help get the car moving from rest. A hybrid has a gasoline engine that is the primary means of moving the car forward. It’s fair to say there is a some confusion about the differences between a hybrid, a plug-in hybrid, and a battery-electric vehicle, so let’s begin there. For the record, it has an 8 kWh battery and a range of 9 miles. There is one other PHEV, the Ferrari SF 90 Stradale, but since it lists for $625,000, we thought most of our readers would not be interested in using one as a commuter vehicle or grocery-getter, so we omitted it. The information is as of September 4, 2022, so there may be some changes since then, but this was the most current information, according to Google. I didn’t know the answer, so I let my friends at Google help me out. Over Christmas dinner, a neighbor asked me what plug-in hybrid cars were available for sale in America.

Plug in hybrid vehicle