
While most are designed and built to be very efficient, they still have an exhaust pipe and still leave a trail of carbon dioxide in their wake at all times.Ī plug-in hybrid can be recharged from an electrical outlet. All the energy supplied to the battery comes from burning gasoline. Typically, the battery and motor have no effect when the car is traveling at a constant speed, such as on the highway.Ī hybrid car has no place to plug in. The benefits are somewhat better fuel economy in stop and go driving.

Usually when you take your foot off the gas, the motor becomes a generator and sends some electricity back to the battery. It usually has a small battery (1.31 kWh in the current Prius) and an electric motor that help get the car moving from rest. A hybrid has a gasoline engine that is the primary means of moving the car forward. It’s fair to say there is a some confusion about the differences between a hybrid, a plug-in hybrid, and a battery-electric vehicle, so let’s begin there. For the record, it has an 8 kWh battery and a range of 9 miles. There is one other PHEV, the Ferrari SF 90 Stradale, but since it lists for $625,000, we thought most of our readers would not be interested in using one as a commuter vehicle or grocery-getter, so we omitted it. The information is as of September 4, 2022, so there may be some changes since then, but this was the most current information, according to Google. I didn’t know the answer, so I let my friends at Google help me out.


Mechanically speaking, BEVs are the least complex of all the vehicles we're covering when you consider that even the simplest multi-cylinder internal combustion engine has many hundreds of moving parts, while an electric motor only has its rotor. Oh, and tons of complex software to manage the thousands of individual cells that make up that big battery. Nick Miotke/Roadshow Battery electricīattery electric vehicles are mostly what they sound like: A big battery with at least one electric drive motor wired to it.
