[vkou]

Commuter[1] PHEVs start at 30 miles EV range.

Which is ~enough to cover the vast majority of commutes, and the majority of US commutes.

Keep in mind that even if 20% of your commute is done on petrol, the other 80% isn't.

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[1] Yes, there are PHEVs with shorter ranges, but those tend to be weird luxury models that for some compliance reason have a battery strapped to them.

[dalyons]

the short ranges make them impractical and annoying to charge all the time, so people just dont in the real world

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...

[tzs]

That data needs to be split out by how the person acquired their PHEV. In much of Europe the majority of PHEVs are purchased by companies because of tax incentives. I remember seeing a study which said that people who are driving a PHEV because it was assigned to them by their employer are much less likely to plug it in than are ordinary consumers who bought or leased a PHEV.

[dalyons]

Does it? It’s a million cars sampled at random. Perhaps fleet affects that a little, but these are big numbers. Claimed 80% reduction in emissions, real world 20%. Some fleet skew is not going to impact that meaningfully

> In much of Europe the majority of PHEVs are purchased by companies because of tax incentives.

Love to see some evidence for that being the majority

[tzs]

In Portugal a whopping 87% of PHEV registrations are to corporations [1]. It was close to 60% in the UK a few years ago [2].

This should not be too surprising, once you learn another fact that is probably more surprising: corporate sales make up a majority of car sales in much of Europe. Around 65% in Germany, 60% in UK, 55% in France (the 3 largest car markets in Europe).

Corporate buyers love PHEVs. They get many of the same or similar tax breaks that full EVs get, whereas hybrids that are not PHEVs usually just get the same corporate tax treatment that ICE cars get. Even though a PHEV usually costs more upfront than a similar regular hybrid which usually costs more than a similar pure ICE, the tax breaks make the PHEV a better deal even if the company has no intention of ever plugging it in.

Compare to individual buyers. They get much fewer incentives from the government. For them the higher cost of a PHEV over a regular hybrid only makes sense if they are going to plug the thing in.

Countries are starting to phase out the PHEV tax breaks for corporations, so we should start seeing the percent of PHEVs that actually get plugged in start to go up.

[1] https://theicct.org/publication/european-market-monitor-cars...

[2] https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/car-industry-news/2022/05/3...

[dalyons]

Although outliers like Portugal are interesting, the whole EU averages are more useful.

you are right in that corporate sales make up ~60% of new car registrations eu wide, that is kinda crazy.

But 11.7% of EU corporate registrations are PHEV [1] versus 9.8% overall [2]. So, it’s a little higher, but not really meaningfully higher.

So yeah, ~61% of new PHEVs registered to corporations. But I’m assuming a majority of those corporate cars get resold after a few years , entering the private registered market. So I don’t really know how to guess at the % of corporate ownership of cars currently on the road. Let’s wildly guess that half of new car reg corporate PHEVs are in private hands now.

That leaves ~33% of total PHEVs corporate owned, which is a sizable chunk and would affect the statistics somewhat, if those folk truly have different behavior.

Btw this analysis of the whole situation has a ton more data than the guardian I originally linked [3]. A huge part of the problem is even in full electric mode the PHEVs still used gas 1/3rd of the time due to weak ev engines. So even if plugged in they’re still a lie in real world emissions.

So I doubt changing the corporate ownership % will change the results that much, but we’ll see.

The biggest change to watch for will actually be once the UF (utility factor) for EU PHEVs is adjusted down in 2027 to match the real world emissions [3]. If they do that, I expect the category to collapse in sales as it won’t make sense for manufacturers to subsidize them as an emissions loophole anymore.

[1] https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/eu-regulation-... [2] https://www.acea.auto/files/Press_release_car_registrations_... [3] https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/eu-regulation-...