Hybrid vs. Electric Vehicles
Hybrid vs. Electric Vehicles
An interesting fact has come to my attention. Toyota has been seen as falling behind other carmakers in transitioning to fully electric vehicles. However, this is probably intentional on Toyota’s part. Its focus is on mass deployment of hybrids to significantly reduce emissions. The carmaker believes that having large numbers of hybrids on the roads has a greater positive impact on the environment than having a smaller-scale adoption of EV’s.
Toyota’s internal documents reveal their 1:6:90 rule, which states that the same amount of raw material used to generate one fully electric vehicle can be used to make six plug-in hybrids or as many as 90 hybrid cars. Besides the smaller requirement for raw materials, Toyota estimates that these 90 hybrid cars combined offset 37 times the carbon emission of a single electric vehicle.
This is particularly interesting because one of the drawbacks of fully electric vehicles is the vast amount of scarce raw materials their manufacture requires, and the open-pit mining required to obtain those raw materials.