For every purchase of electric vehicles a staggering amount of £2,000 to £5,000 grant depending on the car’s brand is given for each smart buyer. The grant is only for fully electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles to lead the green monitoring revolution.

This grant is also a part of the government’s plan to convert Ireland’s vehicles to EV by 2020. Well, the Ireland’s incentive scheme is to exempt electric vehicle drivers from Vehicle Registration Tax. Charging infrastructure will also be provided for the new owners of EV. An agreement with Renault-Nissan has been made to supply all-electric cars from 2011. These companies will supply their all new Nissan LEAF and Kangoo ZE that will surely transform the Irish energy and transport sector. This will also make Ireland as one of the first countries that will utilize a nationwide electric charging network.
The British government is very firm for the continuing support for the low-carbon EV’s and making it as a real option to all motorists. Alternative engine technologies that include hydrogen, natural gas and electric are currently posing some concerns regarding their charging stations.

These battery charging concerns are not just in Europe but anywhere else in the world that are using EV as an alternative vehicle. To address this, the government is setting aside £20 million to set charging points for all major cities and regions. This will also offer opportunities for jobseekers and entrepreneurs. The only remaining question is will the car companies supply the growing demands of electric vehicles? 2012 will be a busy year for the European market and the government is counting on the manufacturers to meet or even exceed these demands. Companies like Tesla, Mitsubishi, Nissan, BMW and a few others will have their vehicles ready by 2012 or even earlier.

The government is also planning to support the ongoing cost acquired by electric drivers. One example is on buying charged batteries. This government assistance will greatly affect the buying decisions of car consumers once this is approved. Europe is currently having a less than 0 .1 percent of electric vehicles in the road today and the government has to increase that number through these tax credits and subsidies. There are approximately 26 million cars on British road today and the government is expecting to raise the number of electric vehicles after the subsidies and other discounts.

The House of Representatives and the Senate are both proposing bills that can help motivate people to try electric cars and most environmentalists are happy with the content of that bill. The bills are suggesting that there should be 15 pilot communities for the assimilation of electric cars in the state. The chosen community’s residents will be eligible for up to $10,000 rebates on plug in vehicles and it could expand to other heavy duty vehicles like commercial SUVs and pickup trucks. And in the Senate’s bill there is a $1.5 million research fund for the development of a battery that could last up to 500 miles when fully charged. These funds are not just for big companies but also for small battery-makers who could improve the current battery technology.
Each pilot community will focus on different cars and not only passenger cars. The first 100,000 residents buying the electric cars in the pilot community will be eligible for $2,000 rebates and or other incentives like a tax credit up to $2,000 when purchasing. Also installing the charging equipment of the car will also help businesses to get up to $50,000 of tax credits when they buy and install charging stations. So isn’t it a sweet deal? Well, the two bills will also extend and increase the incentives of the car manufacturers and also the supporting infrastructures like charging stations. And also the charging equipment’s installations tax credit will be extended until 2017; the rise would also include half than third of the price of the equipments purchased.
Battery production is one of the concerns in the US if they want people to buy electric vehicles.

The poor battery technology is considered as an obstacle for the growing market of PEVs. With this reason the government is giving grants for battery makers to support the green movement. These companies include Ford that will receive nearly $100 million, $240 million grants for General Motors, $70 million grants for Chrysler and the biggest grant is for Johnson Controls for its production of lithium ion battery packs. These grants are given to make the US based battery makers keep up with their Asian counterparts.
According to an automotive analyst R.L Polk & Co. the sales of Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEV) will be doubled by 2012 as the president himself announced a $2.4 billion grant for developing hybrid and EV companies.

The grants are not just for battery makers and EV manufacturers but also for universities. These educational institutions are provided with these grants to train the future generation engineers and consumers as well as to create awareness of the plug-in technology and fuel-cell vehicles.

Public transit grant is also available for any state and municipal government. The U.S. Department of Transportation is urging any government agencies to make use of the plug-in and hybrid technology in purchasing their public transportation. The funding is to help create the awareness on clean-fuels, hybrid electric system including its batteries and fuel cells. The President himself has proclaimed his new standards for fuel economy and has said that one million plug-ins of all kinds will be available by 2015 on all American roadways. The Obama administration has also set aside a whopping $2.8 billion of grants for the research and development of electric cars.

And not just that, the government is also offering a tax rebate of $2,500 to $7,500 to private buyers. These rebates are outright deduction of the vehicle cost that will help boost the PEV sales. The Plug-ins tax credit is worth $2,500 including $417 for each kilowatt-hour of battery capacity over 5 kwh. Part of the credit will be verified by the battery’s capacity that will not exceed to $5,000 which will bring a total credit of $7,500 for PEV.

Let’s be realistic here. Not all buyers can afford or have enough income to purchase an EV and with the rebate it will cut the purchase cost and make it reasonable for everyone. This direct purchase rebate will help jumpstart the country’s transition to zero-emission vehicles. EV vehicles that are under this rebate include the 2012 Nissan LEAF, 2011 Chevrolet Volt, Fisker Karma and Toyota’s Plug-In Hybrid the 2012 Prius.

The Nissan LEAF is one of the new PEVs that are eligible for the $7,500 tax credit while the Toyota Prius is qualified for a $2,500 tax credit due to its smaller battery capacity.
The President himself has proclaimed his new standards for fuel economy and has said that one million plug-ins of all kinds will be available by 2015 on all American roadways. The Obama administration has also set aside a whopping $2.8 billion of grants for the research and development of electric cars. The industry may have to supply the needed amount of batteries in the future to supply the demands for the upcoming rise of electric cars. Although there are still a long way to go for electric cars with their batteries and plug-in technology, there is a huge possibility that this may be a start of a new trend in protecting the environment.

The second problem with this type of speculation is quite simply that any amount of speculation related to hybrid electric vehicles might be wiped out completely if the industry goes bottom up.

The main reason for this is that the gasoline engine’s dominant position in the market is being slowly challenged by two competitors. Not only does it have to deal with the PHEV challenge, it also has to deal with the EV challenge. Any technological breakthrough that helps hybrids will also help electric vehicles whether that is the more compact battery, the better bulk storage system or anything else that was discussed as a potential solution to one of the problems from the previous section.

Therefore, a big breakthrough for the PHEV could actually make full electricity a much more attractive option and that in turn might sink the hybrid market before it even has a chance to float. Of course, it could be the case that the transition from gasoline to PHEV to EV still takes place and hybrid automobiles do have their decade in the sun. Ultimately, there is really no way to know which way that wind will blow with any amount of certainty, but the future of hybrid vehicles does depend a lot on how electric vehicles mature and grow over the same period of time.

With that in mind, there are some interesting points worth discussing in greater detail about the future of hybrid vehicles and that starts with battery technology. Just as is the case with electric vehicles, the battery technology of hybrids is something that can become very effective very quickly.

There are multiple industries looking at developing better battery technology as better batteries can store energy which in turn would allow energy sources like solar and wind energy to become baseline power generators, replacing fossil fuels like coal and natural gas in the process.

These types of industries are highly impressive in terms of their drive to develop better batteries and while the goals of PHEV research are a bit different since they are looking for less bulk rather than better storage, it is also true that one can be used as the pathway to the other. Better storage will mean that the same amount can be stored with fewer battery cells which in turn means that the overall battery bulk will be lowered as well. Since PHEV researchers do share that common ground with many other groups of academics, this is one area where we might begin to see lots of progress within the next few years. Electric vehicle researchers are also working on better battery types which could go a long way towards resolving one of the main problems that PHEVs currently face.

One option that has not existed within the PHEV marketplace for a long time but which might be brought back is the idea of the driver being able to choose between the electric engine and the gasoline engine. If you recall the part of this article that dealt with the history of hybrid cars, you might remember that some of the earlier Audi hybrids actually did offer this option to the driver, but it was an idea that was eventually discontinued.

Modern PHEVs like the Toyota Prius will start off with the electric engine on default but then based on the acceleration curve and the performance needed from the vehicle will switch back and forth between the gasoline engine and the electric engine. This is a good system because it allows the driver to operate the vehicle in the same way that they would operate a normal car, getting the same acceleration while at the same time being able to save a lot of money on eventual gasoline expenses.

However, the introduction of an optional mode switch for the driver is something that would be interesting as well. The switch would be instantaneous at the flick of a switch or push of a button and it would allow the driver to use the electric car for all of their city driving, accepting the acceleration curve that the electric engine was able to provide. They could then switch to the gasoline engine only when they were out on the open highway to get better fuel mileage, giving them a better efficiency rating than any of today’s hybrids. That is an example of some basic change to PHEVs that could really make them much more attractive right now, but whether or not it will be brought back is another story entirely.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, you’ve read through this article completely and allowed the information contained in it to sink into your mind. You should now have a much better understanding of the concept of the hybrid vehicle, the different types of hybrids and more detailed information specifically about the plug-in hybrid vehicle or PHEV. If you don’t have this information, it is worth it for you to go back and reread the article in order to make sure that you have all the information that it offers.

What you do now is entirely your choice. You can file the information away for later use. You can start keeping tabs on the PHEV marketplace to see what new ideas are coming up. You can even go out and start shopping for a PHEV right now to reduce your gasoline consumption and subsequent cost. You’ve got the power of information and now you should try your best to put that information to good use.

Some of the elements used in creating these batteries are expensive (platinum being a good example as it is used in several PHEV and EV designs these days) and that expense will need to be passed onto the consumer regardless of whether mass production takes place or not. Mass production can reduce the overall cost of putting the cars together, but it cannot reduce the cost of rare materials and there are many of those rare materials present in PHEV automobiles.

Going beyond the realm of the physical and focusing more on the specifics of the human contribution to this equation, PHEVs have not had the same amount of research put into them as their internal combustion counterparts. When you look at a PHEV today, what you are really looking at is genuine research for 5-10 years behind that car, some research for 10-20 years before that and sporadic research for 60-80 years before that. Contrast that with the gasoline vehicle which has had genuine research for nearly a century and it becomes easy to see the disparity in technical finesse between the two. This is partially what contributes to the two previous problems discussed above, but it has consequences for just about the entire field of the comparison that can be made.

There are many other problems with PHEVs that are more minor in nature, but the major ones have been discussed above. Some of these problems can be reduced with further research and some of them can be solved with research that will hopefully come up with substitutes that can be used in a cheaper way. However, these problems only serve to illustrate the main point that PHEVs and EVs may be the way of the future, but right now they are a new technology that still has a long way to go in order to achieve market parity.

There are many reasons as to why the PHEV has not caught on and in order to discover these reasons, all you really have to do is halve the problems with the electric vehicle. Think of all of the drawbacks currently that have prevented the electric vehicle from becoming mainstream and then stick the PHEV halfway on a scale between the electric vehicle and the gasoline vehicle. Although this is simplistic and in certain cases inaccurate, it will give you a good mental basis from which to start considering this issue.

One of the biggest issues with PHEVs is weight.

Gasoline powered vehicles have an internal combustion engine that is much lighter than the electric motor and accompanying batteries that are needed for a PHEV to achieve the same kind of performance with a smaller gasoline engine. Although the weight problem is not as bad as it would be for an equivalent electric vehicle due to the smaller number of battery cells required for the vehicle’s operation, it is still enough of an issue to bring down the efficiency a significant amount.

A lot of what the PHEV gains in terms of the switch to a more efficient gasoline system augmented through electrification, it ends up losing through having a larger weight on the car that needs to be towed around. This is a problem that can only be solved through lighter and less bulky battery technology, otherwise it will be a problem that limits the future of the PHEV.

Another physical problem with the PHEV concept is the expense that is involved with creating a hybrid electric vehicle.

This expense problem can be broken down into many different factors but the one that is most prevalent in terms of market conditions currently is the fact that PHEVs are not mass-produced.

This is the same problem that gave the market to gasoline engines in the first place in the early 20th century and it is a problem that has yet to be solved despite 100 years of trying. It is extremely cost effective to mass produce internal combustion engines, but mass production of PHEV or electric vehicles just does not happen. There is not enough demand to justify that step and the modern assembly line also has problems with some of the delicate work that needs to be done in putting these vehicles together. The end result is a built-in market advantage for gasoline vehicles because of their mass production advantages.

Mass production is one factor, but the materials that go into making the car are another factor as well.

Audi was not done with PHEV technology however as they decided to release a 2nd version of their Audi Duo PHEV in 1998. This featured improved technology, improved weight and an overall improvement in performance as a result of those two factors. However, even with these improvements, the market was still not heavily interested in PHEVs and as a result Audi only managed to manufacture about 60 of these vehicles outside of the normal assembly lines that go a long way towards determining which automobile types become successful in both the international and domestic markets.

It was only around the turn of the 21st century that action started to happen in favour of the hybrid solution. The formation of various groups in the early part of the decade such as the Hybrid Electric Vehicle Alliance in 2000 and the National Center of Hybrid Excellence in 2001 allowed groups to exist that were able to disseminate information to the public and educate people on the existence of hybrid electric vehicles. For a market that seemed wary to make the complete shift from gasoline to electricity, the PHEV provided an impressive go-between that allowed people to experience the benefits that could come with electricity while at the same time still holding to the gasoline engines that they felt comfortable with.

Throughout the decade, the state of California within the United States has really been one of the forward thinkers on this issue as they have created numerous work groups within their universities and research institutes, allowing people to take much closer looks at hybrid technology with the express purpose of improving it to the point where it could be competitive with gasoline technology.

At the same time that researchers and thinkers have been looking at interesting new prototypes, private car companies have been able to really benefit from the renewed interest in hybrid electric vehicles. The PHEV concept is a lot easier to mass produce than its counterpart electric vehicle concept and while mass production of PHEVs is not something that has really taken place to date, the construction of larger numbers of famous PHEVs that have now become known to the general public is something that has really helped propel this new line of automobiles forward.

The Toyota Prius is of course the celebrated example of a PHEV and it has received great amounts of popularity and customer appreciation throughout the world. Toyota Prius automobiles are now available for rent from many dealerships as well, proving that this particular automobile has found its way into a certain popular niche in many areas of the world. The Toyota Camry PHEV, although far less popular, has also attained a certain amount of fame since it is a hybrid electric version of one of the best-selling automobiles of all time. Other examples of popular PHEV choices over the decade have included the Ford Escape PHEV and the Nissan Altima PHEV.

However, since hybrids have been around for about 110 years now, it would not be a complete history without taking at least a basic look at the history of the hybrid electric vehicle.

One advantage of this approach is that it very much mirrors the history of most of the other hybrid vehicle types. When you look at flex fuel vehicles that have been engineered to run partially on gasoline and partially on some other substance, the end conclusion to reach about such vehicles is that they have come on as serious contenders within the marketplace only recently, but technology and interest in such vehicles has been around for a very long time. Although their histories are not the same exactly as the hybrid electric vehicle, the same basic premise exists.

The history of the hybrid electric vehicle began in 1899 with a Porsche vehicle that was built with both an electric engine and an internal combustion engine. Somewhat ironically, the internal combustion engine element to the car was the value-added portion that was put there in order to see if the experimental new technology of gasoline was actually a viable way to go. At this point the electric vehicle was still the king of the marketplace and the history of hybrid cars was looking at ways to introduce gasoline into the mix without trying to take the entire market by storm.

The reasons for introducing gasoline-electric hybrids into the market were many and in some ways mirrored the reasons that are used for the reversal that is going on in today’s world. Electric cars were starting to get expensive and while internal combustion engines were still highly unproven technologies at the time, they were cheap.

They would become even cheaper later with the invention of the modern assembly line by Henry Ford, but they were already a lot cheaper pound-for-pound than their fully electric counterparts. It was also worth it because of the higher performance that combustion brought to the automobile, allowing it to perform a lot better and interestingly enough more efficiently than the fully electric vehicles that were considered the industry’s standard at the time.

Although these advances did allow many external hybrids (i.e. hybrids that were charged from some sort of external non-plug in source before the car was used) to be manufactured between 1899 and 1910, these hybrid vehicles were not pursued that much beyond the early part of the 20th century. Fully gasoline vehicles became so popular so fast that people started switching en masse to the combustion engine from the electric one, defeating the purpose of creating the gasoline-electric hybrids in the first place. With everyone getting in on the great bonanza that was the great market switch of the early 20th century in automobiles, this type of hybrid technology fell by the wayside for many decades.

Narrating the next part of this history requires fast forwarding to the year 1969. Although there was no popular automobile that was released into the marketplace, General Motors did receive quite a bit of attention when they released a concept plus some prototypes of the XP-883, a car that was labelled a plug-in hybrid at the time. This car was powered by six lead-acid batteries that were each capable of generating up to twelve volts of electrical potential difference which when combined with the conventional combustion engine allowed the car to not only travel a long ways, but also allowed it to retain a high amount of fuel efficiency in the process. Although General Motors does deserve a lot of credit for coming up with this idea well before any of the companies we now think of as greener were working on hybrid designs, the fact of the matter is that the late 60s oil market was such that this idea never really got off the drawing board.

The irony with the XP-883 is that it was really just a few years too early for its own good. If this car had been produced and headlined in the media a few years later when the oil shocks were taking place, it is quite possible that at the very least the government would have taken a bigger interest in it and hybrid technology may have started developing a full twenty-five years before it developed in our current world. However, the reality is that the XP-883 was unveiled to the world before the oil shocks and in that economy it was heavily overpriced and didn’t go anywhere as a result.

Between then and the turn of the 21st century, the history of hybrid cars is one of continual interest from various companies and continual rejection by the marketplace. One figure of note in this history is a man named Andy Frank, the man that was responsible practically for the invention of the modern plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, started putting forth various academic designs. He started his work in the early 70s with a 1971 car release while at the same time using his position on staff at the University of California to create additional prototypes throughout the 90s.

Although none of his designs were anything more than academic at the time, a lot of the proposed technology that he developed including improved battery designs, electrical flow conduits and general hybrid chassis design have been incorporated into many of the modern plug-in hybrid electric vehicles that have been built. His work has had enough influence in the last decade for him to be referred to albeit infrequently as the father of the modern plug-in hybrid electric vehicle or PHEV for short.

If you’re lucky, a plug in hybrid will result in more than a 50% decrease in the amount of gasoline that you need to purchase. This is governed by any changes in your driving habits, changes in the way in which the equipment works over the course of time and of course diligence on your part in keeping everything properly maintained. Driving habits in terms of acceleration curves also matter as less steep acceleration curves will tend to use more of the electric engine and sharper ones will tend to use more of the gasoline engine.

However, all things being equal, you should be able to more than halve the amount of gasoline you need to take in with a plug in hybrid.

Conventional hybrid electric vehicles should still allow you to halve the amount of gasoline you need to power your vehicle although it is also the case that the conventional hybrids only recharge through regenerative braking and that means that over the course of time they will likely end up drawing less power from the electric engine and more from the gasoline engine.

You can expect to have a higher gasoline to electricity ratio with a conventional hybrid in comparison to a plug in hybrid. Of course, both of those will be much higher than a fully electric vehicle which will use zero gasoline over the course of its life as a vehicle.

Hybrid electric vehicles still derive a large amount of their power from the combustion engine that is located within the vehicle, but enough power is drawn from the electric motor that this combustion engine does not have to be anywhere near as powerful as the average one that you would see within one of the conventional automobiles of the day.

These two types of automobiles both derive at least half of their power from these electric motors and because of that these motors are both charged through the regenerative braking system that is installed in most of these vehicles.

Another thing that these two types of vehicles have in common is the fact that they can be recharged by being plugged in. This particular point requires a caveat because this is not true for all hybrid electric vehicles. There are significant numbers of hybrids that do not recharge through any mechanism other than regenerative braking and for that reason they are not as dependant on their electrical framework as they are on the internal combustion engine that still forms the majority of their power source.

However, new hybrids that have been released within the past few years typically come with plugs that can be used to recharge the vehicles, allowing them to recharge their power cells and continually operate at a peak amount of efficiency. In fact, these “plug in hybrids” are the wave of the future in terms of hybrid technology and unlike the previous generation of hybrid electric vehicles, these ones can be run far more from their electrical half than they would be from their combustion half. In this way, modern plug in hybrids are a lot more like the fully electric vehicles that everyone knows and loves.

Finally, one more fuel hybrid worth mentioning is the bio-fuel hybrid. This category has almost ceased to exist as automobile technology has allowed these vehicles to move from hybrid bio-fuel vehicles to fully bio-fuel vehicles. In fact, that same public transit organization is almost entirely powered by bio-fuel and other fuel hybrid busses to the point where there are very few busses within their fleet that run only on gasoline. Many other public transit agencies have taken that same cue and gone in that direction as well. If all goes well, we can assume that bio-fuels and other flex fuel vehicles will dominate the private and public bus fleets of the world within the next few years.

Be that as it may, the real hybrid vehicle that everyone wants to know about is the hybrid electric vehicle. With that in mind, let us begin the rest of our discussion by taking a close look at how the hybrid electric vehicle measures up with the completely electric vehicle. There are many similarities, but many differences as well.