Sorry if this is an exceptionally stupid question but I hope I’m in good company. If a hybrid vehicle gets 35 mpg, and there’s a comparable non-hybrid vehicle that also gets 35 mpg, do they effectively end up putting out the same amount of emissions? Or does it not really matter what the mpg is and there’s more to it? Thanks so much!
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The issue is the way you phrased the question, MPG literally means gallons of fuel consumed to travel the same distance, so in your question if both vehicles consume the same quantity of fuel to travel the same distance, they will producing the same emissions, as emissions are directly linked to the chemistry of gasoline combustion.
The point is that hybrids will have reduced emissions because they will use less fuel to travel the same distance, so a gasoline car will get 35 MPG and the equivalent hybrid will get 50, the 15 MPG difference is reduced emissions.
One point not made yet is that gasoline engines are not universally efficient at all speeds, meaning a car might get 15 miles per gallon when driving 0-15 miles per hour, get 30 miles per gallon from 15-40 miles per hour, and 22 miles per gallon when driving at 40-75 miles per hour. Electric motors *are* universally efficient, meaning they consume the same amount of energy to go from 0-15 as they 50-75 miles per hour (I’m referring to the engine, the actual performance of the car with aerodynamics is more complicated).
This is why we have two different kinds of hybrid car, *parallel hybrids* can swap back and forth from gasoline engine to electric motor, which means you might be running the gas engine at speeds where it’s pretty inefficient. *Series hybrids* only use their electric motors to drive the car and use the gasoline engine as a generator to produce electricity for the electric motor. This configuration is more efficient as you can regulate the gasoline engine to only operate at it’s peak performance levels to charge the battery and let the electric motor handle the rest.
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