Plug-in polluter? Why Canada may need to rethink 'transition' EV

Pitched as a great compromise for the environmentally conscious yet road-tripping driver, plug-in hybrids — or PHEVs — have a few problems. 

For one, people aren’t plugging them in. 

Study after study show these vehicles — which boast an electric motor for emission-free rides and a gas engine for longer range — are actually being used more in gas mode. This means they’re polluting a lot more than a customer might think.

Critics argue this discrepancy lets manufacturers get an attractive fuel consumption rating based on ideal conditions that aren’t being met by many drivers. 

And as Canada considers the future of its electric vehicle regulations, there are questions about how plug-ins should count. 

PHEVs are about one per cent to three per cent of new Canadian car registrations in the last five years. Despite being the smallest chunk of electric car sales, that still amounts to hundreds of thousands of these vehicles on Canadian roads. 

The most recent criticism of PHEVs comes from an umbrella group of environmental NGOs, which used real-world fuel consumption data from hundreds of thousands of plug-in hybrids in Europe. The data is collected in the EU as part of regulation to prevent misrepresentation and fraud, taken wirelessly or during maintenance on any new cars after 2021. 

The analysis found that electric mode was only used around 30 per cent of the time, despite official assumptions it would be used more than 80 per cent of the time. Carbon emissions were nearly five times higher than projected, and driver behaviour was part of the problem. 

“The first generation of plug-in hybrids was not used in electric mode very much,” said Colin McKerracher, who leads the Transport and Energy Storage Group at Bloomberg NEF. 

Typically, they had battery ranges of 50 to 80 kilometres and couldn’t fast charge, making it inconvenient for drivers to keep them topped up. In Europe, he says, a lot of these were company cars, further disincentivizing drivers who didn’t have to pay for gas anyway.   

For manufacturers, the incentive to make these cars was clear, experts say. As governments pushed to decarbonize transportation, PHEVs helped meet those new standards, McKerracher says. 

“A lot of the early plug-in hybrids that were on the market were really compliance cars,” he told CBC News from Oslo. “They were either to satisfy [environmentally stricter] California regulations or European vehicle CO2 regulations to try and allow automakers to comply with tightening targets.”

At the same time, adding an electric motor could allow cost-savings through the same manufacturing process as non-electric models. 

In Canada, PHEVs helped manufacturers meet the Trudeau government’s roadmap to make all new car sales electric by 2035 — a mandate currently paused by the Carney government.