Hybrids: Climate Delay via a Dead-End Technology

‘Discourses of climate delay’ pervade current debates on climate action. These discourses accept the existence of climate change, but justify inaction or inadequate efforts. In contemporary discussions on what actions should be taken, by whom and how fast, proponents of climate delay would argue for minimal action or action taken by others.”  Reference here 

Whether by design, or by lack of technical ambition, the rise in UK sales of “mild hybrids” is a troubling trend. 

As noted in the quote and diagram above, deliberate or not, the sudden rise of “mild hybrids” appears to be a car manufacturer marketing effort aimed at delaying the energy transition to faster, cheaper, higher quality 100% battery electric vehicles (BEVs) – an exercise in climate delay via championing non-transformative, fossil-fuel “solutions”. 

The dichotomy of BEV and ICE  

In a straightforward road transport world there would be two types of cars to choose from today: those with a plug that run completely on electricity via batteries (BEVs), and those that don’t, and run totally on fossil fuels instead, i.e. petrol and diesel (ICE). 

100% BEVs emit zero CO2 from their tail-pipe (they don’t have one), are easier to drive (all automatic, no clutch), cheaper to maintain, and cheaper to run. In addition, due to rapid sales increases which reduce battery costs, they are becoming ever cheaper to buy. This future is already with us: Mini-EVs in the world’s leading EV manufacturer (China) already retail for about £3-4,000 if you are willing to have low ranges of ca 100 miles on a charge. 

BEVs will only continue to get cheaper every year – unlike conventional fossil-fuel cars which have more or less flat-lined in price, or are getting more expensive as a trend to bigger SUVs has taken place, in part driven by the fatter margins they provide (today) to conventional car makers.

You see where this is going – think landlines vs iPhones (a pretty accurate analogy) - but the world is not simple.

One of the greatest impediments to the energy transition in major sectors such as transport - to a cleaner, cheaper electricity alternative - is what can be termed “incumbent inertia”. The fossil fuel system - especially in transport - is highly-capitalised, well-organised, well supported and has deep capabilities of branding, marketing and communications. 

Many car manufacturers may be generally supportive of climate change initiatives, and broadly sympathetic to the aims of EVs, but their main business model is carefully crafted around the fossil-fuel combustion engine. This goes beyond manufacturing and technology, and affects organisations, unions, supply chains and so on. 

So – a wrenching change toward electric cars is not a natural development for them. For this reason, many OEMs still have ICE cars rolling off their factory floors. 

Despite the stubbornness, the world is changing, and the rise of Tesla and China (essentially California and China Inc, innovation and brute force manufacturing) is now forcing changes to take place - just as Apple and China changed the world of telephony. 

The story of EVs so far this decade has been powerful: battery EVs have grown at a rate of over 100% pa to reach 5-10% of new sales in crucial markets: the EU, China and America (well, California anyway). At this rate it is likely that EVs could reach > 40% sales by 2025, and > 80% by 2030 in these key markets.

It would be unwise to declare victory any time soon as the incumbent fossil fuel industry has many passive and active tools to use to slow or deflect change. 

The passive tools may be the more potent - and thus emerges the “clean” fossil fuelled car. A middle ground between EV and ICE - that tries to bridge the gap, and somehow falls short on both ends of the divide.

Hybrids - Breaking the dichotomy 

In between fully electric vehicles and conventional petrol and diesel cars, we have a thicket of “hybrids”. These now come in exotic varieties: plug-in hybrids, pure hybrids, mild-diesel hybrids, and mild-petrol hybrids.

Note: even “plug-in” hybrids are a problem: they are typically heavy, SUV-style vehicles, often driven in non-electric mode – real-world emissions are therefore frequently higher than efficient smaller pure petrol or diesel cars.

Whilst 100% EVs have grown impressively from 6% of sales a year ago to 11% now, unfortunately the menagerie of hybrids has moved from 20% of sales to 40%. It would be comforting to think that such hybrids were 50% as good as 100% EVs – but that is not the case. The best hybrid models, even those that plug-in only reduce emissions by 5-20% - or even less in real-world conditions.  

The reality is that as 100% electric cars strive to make headway on the roads in the UK and world-wide, car manufacturers have cluttered the way forward with a marketing ploy (or in the academic language fossil-fuel solutionism).

Mild hybrids are just fossil fuel cars with a bit of efficiency built-in, but their marketing vibe has allowed many buyers to feel they can have a large SUV whilst being “eco-friendly”. This is impossible, and solves nothing. These vehicles have emissions that are largely the same as fossil fuel equivalents – or even worse as they are often heavier cars that are driven further in the belief they are emitting less. 

Mild hybrids are an example of how we are NOT solving the emissions issue in transportation by either wittingly or (worse ?) unwittingly attempting to put an incremental solution on a problem that requires much more drastic action.  Every decision to buy a “Mild Hybrid” puts a high-emitting vehicle (ca 2 tonnes per year of CO2 for over 8 years minimum) on the road, and so another 16 tonnes pumped into the air above UK streets by over 30 million drivers. 

It is slightly depressing to see that a huge OEM such as Toyota continue to push this solution rather than take up the electric mantle: potentially putting corporate leadership or pride above  global impact. That’s why “Mild Hybrids” are, actually, a way of creating a harsher impact on the environment by deflecting us away from a fully electric vehicle alternative. 

In an ironic twist of fate (or science), it would be better if motorists kept their current petrol or diesel cars for perhaps another 2 years, before switching to fully electric cars when there is more choice at a lower cost. In such cases, the older polluting petrol car is only used for an extra 2 years before being replaced by a zero emissions vehicle. A “mild” hybrid bought today could remain on the road for over a decade, however, whilst remaining just as environmentally damaging as the pure ICE. 

This is in fact such a rational response that there is a well-documented phenomenon called the Osborne effect – see here – that explains how new sales of conventional technology (conventional fuel cars) will dip heavily ahead of a new technology (100% EVs) as consumers wait to purchase the newer improved tech that they can clearly see coming their way. 

Mild Hybrids are the incumbent car industry’s response to avoiding such a steep fall: it’s a marketing ruse to trigger consumers into buying a new “environmentally-responsible” vehicles, when the truly responsible thing to do would be to stop building hybrids of any sort, even plug-in ones, and switch to fully-electric vehicles. 

As the industry moves rapidly to pure EVs, the best cars and best manufacturers will shift focus to pure EVs, as opposed to the older petrol / diesel technologies or their hybrid cousins.

Regarding the best pure EVs - Tesla is already there, VW seems to be heading there quickly, and many of the larger Chinese  firms such as BYD are also rapidly going down that road. With each month that goes past, we are observing higher and higher BEV sales, coupled with increasingly lower sales of fossil fuel, or fossil-fuel hybrid cars.

A Lose-Lose Scenario 

The proliferation of hybrids has the potential of being a lose-lose situation for everyone: the consumer is conned into buying a polluting vehicle, the OEMs cling to a declining business model that threatens shareholder returns and employee jobs, and subsidised (or untaxed if you prefer) CO2 is still dumped into the environment providing no revenue for the government, and riskier present-day health issues, and future climate risk. 

Climate delay via hybrids – plug-in, pure or mild – is one more way of incumbent fossil fuel inertia stopping the move to a better electrical transport future – right up there with “carbon-capture and storage” and demands to build more coal mines or gas plants on the back of speculative higher-cost fossil-fuel sustaining technologies. 

Bottom-line: hybrid cars are a dead-end technology that benefits neither consumer, government, citizen, environment nor car manufacturing stakeholders: the move to 100% battery EVs, well underway, needs to be embraced by leading car OEMs or they face notoriety in historical case studies as strong incumbents who fumbled a relatively simple transition through inertia and cynical marketing.