The Accord plug-in hybrid will offer about 15 miles of EV range
The economical plug-in hybrids?
While at the International Rechargeable Battery Expo in Tokyo, Hirohisa Ogawa, a chief engineer of battery research at Honda, told the audience that Honda’s new plug-in hybrids will offer an EV range “of up to 15 miles“.
That puts Honda’s plug-in hybrid EV range in the same ballpark as Toyota’s plug-in hybrids.
According to early reports, the Prius plug-in hybrid might only offer 12 miles of EV range, giving Honda a small edge in plug-in electric range. That’s in contrast to Honda’s current hybrids – hybrids that never use solely electricity to power the car, unlike Toyota’s hybrid cars.
Certainly, some will pooh-pooh the shorter EV range of these vehicles compared to something like the Chevy Volt, which was designed to offer about 40 miles of EV range. However, numerous battery studies have suggested that smaller battery packs mean better cost-effectiveness for consumers until major breakthroughs are achieved in battery technologies.
Anyway, Toyota seems much better positioned than Honda when it comes to plug-in hybrids. Thanks to the similarities between the current third generation Prius and the plug-in Toyota Prius, Toyota seems well scaled considering the hybrid king has already sold more than 3 million hybrid cars.