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About 18 months ago, BMW began selling a plug-in hybrid version of its mid-size sedan for the first time. The 530e is a more expensive and voluminous version of the sports sedan of the German manufacturer. It travels about 48 km with a load and reaches a maximum of 100 km / h, a speed that is suitable for a German highway.
This is the kind of hybrid that hypermilers, as those who are interested in using effective driving techniques, would have imagined that when Toyota unveiled the original Prius, there are two decades.
The BMW 530e is more opulent than a Tesla and certainly more fun to drive, but that does not seem to matter to customers. Tesla's all-electric model 3 started to hit the market at the end of 2017, and in the last year it has been 15 times better than the BMW.
It is becoming increasingly clear that plug-in hybrid vehicles, those green chimeras that have long promised to drive fashionable automakers to an energy-efficient future, will never go beyond their current position as an automotive subsector. The electric car now seems ready to turn these hybrids into a historic accident.
"A [vehículo] All-electric is a much more elegant solution, "said Gil Tal, director of the Rechargeable and Electric Hybrid Vehicle Research Center at the University of California, Davis. They are very simple to build and require very little maintenance. "In retrospect, he argues, plug-in hybrids" are just training wheels "in preparation for the electric car industry.
In the United States, sales of all-electric vehicles surpassed those of plug-in hybrid vehicles, by almost 3 times for a third quarter, according to new data released by Bloomberg NEF. In the coming months, battery-only machines will overtake unconnected hybrid vehicles, a category that includes a wide range of vehicles such as the Prius.
General Motors announced Monday that it would eliminate the Chevrolet Volt, a hybrid considered the company's future when it was launched in 2010. These days, the Volt is struggling to keep up with its brother, the Bolt, an all-electric model that Chevrolet offered to Rendez-vous in 2016.
Ironically, the market shift comes at a time when hybrids have finally become quite efficient, with a wave of new high quality products. In dozens of the world's most popular vehicles, an electric motor is now an option, as is a luggage rack or a set for extremely low temperatures.
US buyers can choose hybrid versions of the Honda Accord, Toyota RAV4, Nissan Rogue and Chevrolet Malibu.
This year, however, US consumers who had this option bought the hybrid version only 5% of the time, according to an analysis by Edmunds.com. Others drive the old gasoline vehicle or opt for fully battery powered models, such as the Tesla or Nissan Leaf.
It is likely that some buyers, who may have already considered using a plug-in hybrid system, are now waiting for a parade of new, fully electric vehicles to reach dealers in the coming years.
"It's one of the big theses on the market right now," said Salim Morsy, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. "If these vehicles had exactly the same price, you would expect people to buy them."
Automotive industry leaders who have spent two decades in search of hybrids have tended to overestimate the rationality of auto buyers, and it is not difficult to understand why.
Gather enough data on household income and daily commutes. A Detroit CEO will therefore understand the logic of offering a plug-in hybrid that can run on electricity for about 30 miles (30 km), a distance that an average American vehicle usually travels. The problem is that many of these potential buyers want a van, convertible sport utility vehicle or electron spacecraft ready for a three-hour trip.
"When we ask people if they are interested in a hybrid, everyone says," Yes, of course, "" said Michelle Krebs, an analyst at Autotrader. "But then you look at how they buy and what they buy and you do not see it." In the United States, hybrid vehicles have weakened since 2013, when they briefly covered 3% of the market.
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