Americans are Buying Twice as Many Hybrids as Fully Electric Vehicles. Is The Next Step Synthetic Fuels? (yahoo.com)
- Reference: 0178136209
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/22/0616202/americans-are-buying-twice-as-many-hybrids-as-fully-electric-vehicles-is-the-next-step-synthetic-fuels
- Source link: https://autos.yahoo.com/once-considered-pass-hybrids-roar-130000212.html
> Car shoppers balked at the high prices of fully electric models and the challenges of charging them. In the last few years, sales of electric vehicles have grown at a much slower rate than automakers once expected. And hybrids have stepped in to fill the gap, accounting for a large and growing share of new car sales... In the first three months of this year, hybrids — including cars that can and cannot be plugged in — made up [2]about 14 percent of all light vehicles sold in the United States, according to the Department of Energy. That was around twice the market share of fully electric vehicles in that period...
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> Several automakers are slowing the introduction of new electric vehicles, and have accelerated development of new hybrids.
Robb Report looks at the current status of hybrids — [3]and a possible future :
> "The charging infrastructure in most countries is not yet mature enough to support convenient mass adoption of battery-electric vehicles, and in some territories never will be," says Jonathan Hall, head of research and advanced engineering at U.K.-based consulting group Mahle Powertrain....
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> Porsche, active in this space since 2010, just [4]hybridized its iconic 911 for this model year. Lamborghini also joined the trend with the debut of its [5]1,000 hp Revuelto hybrid in 2023. "The company doesn't plan to give up the internal-combustion engine anytime soon," says CTO Rouven Mohr. "We are also considering synthetic fuels to keep ICE vehicles running after 2030."
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> Hall concurs: "With the emergence of bio-based and even fully synthetic fuels, the link between the ICE and climate change can be broken." Combined with the development of better batteries, this progressive hybrid model could offer the best of both worlds for years to come.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/business/energy-environment/hybrid-cars-electric-vehicles.html
[2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65384
[3] https://autos.yahoo.com/once-considered-pass-hybrids-roar-130000212.html
[4] https://robbreport.com/motors/cars/lists/2025-best-automotive-1236748639/
[5] https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/first-drive-lamborghini-hybrid-revuelto-140000750.html
Synthetic fuels (Score:2)
Aren't happening.
Let me get this straight. To make a synthetic fuel you need to burn some energy in processing. Does your new synthetic fuel have more energy than you put into it? Unlikely. You created something more expensive with less stored energy than the raw materials. Who is going to buy your new more expensive fuel that's less energy dense than gasoline?
Same deal with hydrogen. It's an amazing fuel. You just have to burn energy to get some.
Re: Synthetic fuels (Score:2)
Use solar to get the initial charge without fuel costs
Probably, but not because it makes sense (Score:2)
If you want to keep burning fuels, making synfuels doesn't appear as if it will make sense any time soon, because of the energy cost. It's a lot cheaper to make biofuel from algae grown in open raceway ponds as proven at Sandia NREL in the 1980s (yes, I have been posting sentences similar to that here for decades ) because you get the energy for making the hydrocarbon chains from the sun. Clean water is hard to come by, but algae doesn't need clean water to grow in; it can be contaminated, brackish, etc.
But
Told you (Score:2)
I [1]knew [slashdot.org] we would get here. The sales trend was obvious as much as three years ago, but only if you aren't a pie-eyed EV advocate that can't tolerate any anti-EV facts.
There are genuinely good hybrid products available now in every segment of the market, from compact to medium trucks. Government Motors, however, can always be relied on to go full establishment group-think, so now they're caught out again, playing catch up.
[1] https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23396766&cid=64646464
Toyota Hybrids (Score:3)
We put down a fully refundable deposit, but they told us 1-2 years wait for delivery.
That was for a RAV4 or Highlander.