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Seems odd to exclude PHEVs.

Most rides are under 50 miles, which means emission-free rides on most occasions. They don't hound chargers and need smaller batteries. Win-win if you ask me.

Issues with PHEV in my experience that people CBA to charge their car when the battery depletes and will treat their cars as if they are ICE only. And in that case they just weigh more, put more pressure on the road and the battery takes up quite the bit of cargo space.

Getting 50 extra miles in your garage or a 15 minute pitstop is a lot easier than charging an EV to full. Each 50 mile charge is about 2 gallon saved, and people like to save $10 every few days if possible.

PHEVs are lighter than full EVs, and incentivize the manufacturer to build a smaller car. (EVs are longer because the batteries take up lots of horizontal space). If Mazda's experiments pay off, then a wankel [1] engine PHEV will be space efficient and sustainable. Now not everyone needs to tow, but EVs are horrible at towing. A PHEV is an ideal long-term alternative to petrol for heavy-hauling use cases.

I firmly believe fully emissions-free vehicles will be the future. But the powergrid & charging infrastructure for 100% EV are at least 10-20 years away. Until then, PHEVs should be encouraged as a stopgap, especially for countries without easy ways to generate renewable energy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3gzQVGEqF4

I calculated how much our savings would be if we buy a PHEV instead of a new ICE (or a very efficient mild hybrid like the civic or a corolla) and we wouldnt get even after 5 years, because buying a PHEV costs that much more.

Of course this is based on our car usage patterns so its really subjective.

I agree with you on the powergrid and charging infrastructure. A counterpoint i rarely see is if everyone would switch to EVs or PHEVs in 5 years, the electrical infra would collapse. And the electricity price world skyrocket and it would not be this cheap as it is now. So we should keep that in mind when we calculate the savings.

> A counterpoint i rarely see is if everyone would switch to EVs or PHEVs in 5 years, the electrical infra would collapse.

Electricity grids are massively overbuilt and underutilized because they need to deal with a big spike of power usage in the early evenings. So if grids became strained by EVs, it would be relatively easy to fix this: just encourage or mandate time of day tariffs.

The price signal would encourage people to charge outside of peak times. The improved utilization of the grid may even reduce distribution costs per kWh.

There are many countries where this is not true. Look up loadshedding in South Africa, for example.

Over the last 30 years, South Africa's generation capacity has crumbled from 37GW to 28GW. So yes, sure, electrifying anything there is not going to work. But I'd say that's a completely different category of problems.

Why are people making this claim?

PHEVs have the potential to lower emissions, but humans are lazy based on the data. Ergo, you have to engineer around the human (support BEVs, do not support PHEVs through policy).

https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/features/phev-owners-not...

https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/plug-in-hybrids-are-t...

I don't think these studies are saying what you think they are. The incentives are clear for a PHEV that you can plug in yourself in your home. its cheaper and not hard to do.

This is a very strong prior, and with a little digging you can find out that these cars are being bought by tax credits, and then used by people who do not have access to chargers. Either because it is a rental or because it is a company car. If it is a company car, the reimbursement process for gas is easier, and why would I go through the hassle if I'm not the one saving money?

The case for PHEVs is very strong, it is a much more economical use of lithium battery capacity, is cheaper to operate, produces less CO2, and can be operated like an ICE vehicle in a pinch.

They strategically dominate EVs. Its absurd to suggest otherwise

If you have data demonstrating strong EV use of PHEVs (vs defaulting to ICE most of the time), provide it, but it is absurd to propose these suboptimal vehicles will be maximized for low emissions use based on human behavior.

It doesn’t matter how strong the case is for PHEVs if the data doesn’t conclusively demonstrate they’re being used appropriately to minimize emissions. That’s just hope, and hope is not a strategy. Frankly, PHEV tax credits should be something like revenue you have to recognize over time, only provided when proven they’re being used in the manner desired (versus at time of purchase, after which you might not ever even plug the vehicle in).

I will not provide data, your data shows it quite well enough. The mechanism by which PHEV's achieve strategic dominance is more than enough evidence.

In my opinion, if we're banning ads for certain types of cars, we should ban ads for all cars. Tires, brakes, roads, manufacturing related pollution, etc are substantial for all. It just seems like feel-good legislation when we ignore the obvious.

Personal cars are not going away anytime soon. All of the problems you mention are much less important than dealing with CO₂ and so more good is accomplished by allowing advertising to influence those who are going to buy cars to buy those that are lower when it comes to CO₂.

I think you're missing that those things involve CO2 as well. While CO2 is important, it's level of importance as ranked against other concerns is largely based on one's opinion.

Good call.

If I remember right, then tire-wear [1] is the primary contributor to particulate emissions and a signifcant portion of vehicular pollution comes from the existence of the vehicle itself. (manufacturing, road maintenence)

[1] https://dynomight.net/tires/

I rented a PHEV in France (Paris area) recently. Electricity is more expensive than gas, and even though I wanted to pay extra in most towns there was no charging stations. So I mostly drove it on gas.

Isn't this a major win for the PHEV ?

Through regenerative braking, so you get the benfits of a Hybrid. You can charge your PHEV at home during the week, and avoid the inconvienences of an EV when on a road trip.

Well, yes, mileage was very good indeed.

They burn fossil fuels forever. EVs get greener as the grid approaches 100% low carbon energy, which will happen based on all available trajectory data.

If cell manufacturing is the supply constraint, continue to scale up.

> If cell manufacturing is the supply constraint

It hasn’t been for few years now

>Seems odd to exclude PHEVs.

Not if this is just in service of an overarching goal of banning cars entirely.

> PHEVs have been shown not to yield meaningful emissions savings over conventional vehicles.

Can you say or link to more about this? My family borrowed a PHEV Prius Prime for about six weeks. Our fuel economy over that time was ~210mpg, nearly an order of magnitude better than the sedan it temporarily replaced.

That's because your family actually bothered to plug it in. A lot of people who drive PHEVs only do so for the tax credits, etc., and always just run them on gas.

Even on long trips where we didn’t have the opportunity to plug it in, we were seeing ~65mpg, which is still a notable improvement over regular cars.

But non PHEVs still have higher fuel economy than conventional ICE cars? Hybrid cars are more fuel efficient not only through the fact you can plug them in. They also get efficiency gains through regenerative braking and more efficient engine cycles[1], none of which requires plugging in to work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson_cycle

what are you talking about? If you are after the tax credit, you're probably after the cost savings of plugging your vehicle in. This doesnt make sense as a hypothesis.

It's a thing, though perhaps a UK specific thing. Perverse incentives in the tax system mean it's cheaper to own a company PHEV than the equivalent but there is little to no allowance for charging it at home.

Ok, but the people drawing generalizations from this are being crazy then.

Okay, the reason is a guess, but it's proven that people aren't plugging in: see, e.g., https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/features/phev-owners-not... and https://www.autoweek.com/news/a60383277/wltp-phev-data-gap-r...

"all firms and associated sub brands or lobbying organisations that extract, refine, produce, supply, distribute, or sell any fossil fuels"

What about all the secondary products of refining? Things like plastics, waxes, etc? Seems like they should include those too.

I wonder if you are allowed to advertise a holiday to Australia.

I would guess so, bit that feels really arbitrary (like the rest of the restrictions).

> Their engines run 24/7, often even at port which has damaging impacts on air quality.

IIRC all new cruise ships run on LNG, so air quality issue is a moot.

Really?

Every ship I see in port is still belching clouds of black smoke from bunker fuel. Never heard of a LNG ship.

https://www.cruisemummy.co.uk/lng-cruise-ships/

This lists 21 out of ~300 total cruise ships are LNG.

This says most new passenger ships are LNG:

https://www.cruisemapper.com/wiki/752-cruise-ship-engine-pro...

Obviously depends on cruise company and the tail is pretty long of smaller companies who aren't building new ones.

> PHEVs have been shown not to yield meaningful emissions savings over conventional vehicles.

???

Even just being a regular hybrid should offer meaningful emissions savings over standard ICE cars, due to the increased fuel efficiency, let alone a plug-in.

I'd be very curious to see the data/calculations on this, because it certainly sounds like bullshit.

My parents new hybrid rav4 gets 35mpg, which is approximately what my 7 seat ford galaxy minivan gets with a 2l diesel. That’s also approximately what my civic wagon got in the mid 90’s.