Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Electric Vehicles

The New EPA Car Standards Could Mean Even More Hybrids

It all comes down to math.

An EV and tailpipes.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Last week, the Biden administration announced its final car emission standards, aimed at pushing the auto industry to create more zero-emission vehicles. While there’s plenty in the 1,200-page document for policy wonks, politicians, environmental advocates, and automakers to hem and haw over, there’s at least one thing no one seems too bothered about: The new emissions rules stand to boost plug-in and conventional hybrid sales, thanks in part to some small changes to how their emissions are considered within the mix of an automaker’s fleet.

To recap: The biggest headline change from the proposed rule to the final one is that automakers now have a slower ramp toward reducing their fleet-wide emissions by roughly 50% come 2032. A handful of sensational headlines notwithstanding, the new rules do not mandate that automakers build and sell only EVs. The point is to reduce tailpipe emissions. How automakers go about it is their business.

“Automakers may see it fit to introduce more hybrids and plug-in hybrids, along with some electrics,” Thomas Boylan, regulatory director at the Zero Emissions Transportation Association, told me. “Or if they can find the engineering capacity to create an internal combustion engine that doesn't produce tailpipe emissions, that's a viable pathway to these standards,” he added. That said, how automakers account for the emissions from their fleets — and specifically from hybrids and plug-in hybrids — is not open to interpretation.

When plug-in hybrids are running on battery power, the Environmental Protection Agency counts those as zero-emission miles. Historically, the EPA has assumed that everyone with a PHEV plugs it in every day and is therefore maximizing its battery-powered mileage, however more recent studies have shown that is probably not actually the case.

“There's some mixed data out there in terms of how frequently people who own these [PHEV] vehicles plug them in, and that's a big factor in how much compliance they should get,” Chris Harto, the senior policy analyst for transportation and energy at Consumer Reports, told me.

“How much compliance they should get” became a key question in how the new car emissions standards would account for PHEVs. The draft rule issued last year had proposed reducing the amount of compliance credit automakers would get for plug-ins starting in model year 2027 to account for the discrepancy in battery miles traveled. But the final rule delayed that phase-in until model year 2031, in order “to provide additional stability for the program, and to give manufacturers ample time to transition to the new compliance calculation.”

Hybrid and PHEV vehicle sales have been surprisingly robust over the past few years, as Jesse Jenkins pointed out on Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast. Hybrid electric sales were about on par with battery electric sales in 2023, at around 1.1 million vehicles each, Jenkins said, which is “way higher than what we expected.”

As of February, plug-in and traditional hybrid sales were growing five times faster than EV sales, Morgan Stanley reported. The Argonne National Laboratory also found that during the same month, PHEV and hybrid sales rose to more than 130,000 all together. To put that in perspective, last year's record EV sales alone averaged just about 100,000 per month across all brands. These robust sales numbers, combined with the new EPA tailpipe emission rules, could continue to drive growth in hybrid and PHEV sales, even as EV sales growth cools.

“I think a lot of automakers underappreciated the big bump in hybrid sales that many people have rightly celebrated in 2023. That huge jump in hybrid sales coincides directly with a huge jump in EPA emission standards from 2022 to 2023,” Harto told me. In 2021, the Biden administration revised a Trump-era rule that sought to weaken vehicle emission standards. Those revised rules, which took effect for the 2023 model year, were 10% tighter than the year prior.

“These standards have a history of pushing automakers to deliver vehicles that save consumers money on fuel,” Harto said. “I don't think we would have seen the jump in hybrid sales that we saw last year without the jump in emission standards in 2023.”

Still, he noted, “The more hybrids (or other gasoline efficiency improvements) and PHEVs automakers build, the fewer BEVs they will have to build to comply.”

This will likely slow the EV adoption curve, but if it leads to more and cheaper plug-in hybrids than we would have had otherwise, it could help U.S. consumers get more comfortable with the idea of plugging in rather than filling up their cars.

“I think the final rule reflects more of an understanding that there will be more hybrid electric vehicle penetration rates over the next few years,” Boylan told me. While the true cost and emissions savings are in fully battery electric vehicles, it might take consumers a minute to get there. “I think, ultimately, a PHEV offers an opportunity to educate a consumer on what an electric vehicle might be able to do to meet their personal needs, and that creates a pathway to a true BEV purchase, on the next vehicle.”

Yellow

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Economy

Tariffs Will Flatten the U.S. Bicycle Industry

Businesses were already bracing for a crash. Then came another 50% tariff on Chinese goods.

An e-bike and money.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

When I wrote Heatmap’s guide to driving less last year, I didn’t anticipate that a good motivation for doing so would be that every car in America was about to get a lot more expensive.

Then again, no one saw the breadth and depth of the Trump administration’s tariffs coming. “We would characterize this slate of tariffs as ‘worse than the worst case scenario,’” one group of veteran securities analysts wrote in a note to investors last week, a sentiment echoed across Wall Street and reflected in four days of stock market turmoil so far.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Economy

Tariffs Are Making Gas Cheaper — But Not Cheap Enough

Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.

A gas station.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.

But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Electric Vehicles

There Has Never Been a Better Time for EV Battery Swapping

With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.

A battery with wheels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.

That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.

Keep reading...Show less
Green