Why aren’t there more hybrid vehicles before we go to all electric cars & trucks?
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There are a LOT of hybrid vehicles. Looking at the EPA website, you can find that just over 18% of the cars that a certified to be sold in the US are hybrids (and about 6% are all electric). That means 76% are diesel, gas, or flex-fuel (ethanol or gas) cars and trucks.
The conventional gas car is something that existing plants are designed to build. The materials and supply lines for them already in place. The automative engineers, already well acquainted with how to design them. All those things make them relatively cheap and quick to churn out, and people are used to driving them.
Hybrid cars are more complicated. You have both the standard gas car parts, but then you have batteries and electric motors, and you need additional parts to connect them together. Now, you have to cram all that into pretty much the same space. It makes them more complicated to design and build, and there’s more parts. This makes them slower to churn out and build, needs new tools and skills, more varied materials from more places, and makes them a bit more expensive (or, lower profit). They more or less drive the same, save for “drive modes” perhaps, so people are pretty OK with buying and driving them.
Electric cars are mechanically MUCH simpler. The engineering is just as much electrical and even chemical. Much different materials are needed, so new supply lines, and they are assembled much differently, so new plants and different skills to build them. Moreover, electric cars use a different fuel source and some drive much differently, which throws many people off. It’s only recently that people have really taken a shine to electric.
That said, electric cars require less maintenance, are cheaper to operate, can be fueled at home, tend to have more pick-up, are generally more efficient, and a far less polluting than hybrid or gas cars. If supply lines mature and battery technology improves, they are a very practical replacement for cars that rely on carbon fuels at point-of-use. Moreover, the sources of electricity get increasingly more renewable and carbon neutral with time, and there are no emissions.
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