kimchi

The only Fast Charging most EV owners do is on road trips. The rest is more like plugging your cell phone in while you sleep. So the relevant comparison is: how long do you usually stop for a bio-break & snack+checkout. I wish I could get the family in and out a convenience store as fast as the EV6 charges (though it's much slower than Blade2's high-speed charge).

Of course, most petrol users fuel-up weekly in the USA, so the petrol car is starting each road trip at a disadvantage. If you fuel-up with petrol for 4 minutes, 4x/month, and road-trip 1x/month, then the petrol car starts each road trip 16 minutes behind.

The way I read it is:

• if you never plug-in overnight, and the vehicle is big, and you drive aggressively, you get 34mpg (believable)
• but if you plug-in a small car every night, and you get 75% of your miles electric, and you drive like a grandma, then you get 223mpg (believable)

Sadly, it sounds like Porsche drivers may fall into the first category and Toyota drivers in the second. And there are enough Porches to skew the MPG of the whole PHEV class.

(it's also possible that Porsche/VW/Audi just make PHEVs that score well on gov't tests but poorly in the real world, though I'd lean towards the drivers. But the article title really implies that all PHEVs get shockingly bad mileage)

The article is horribly unclear: it seems to say that PHEVs are no good, but "the main reason for the higher-than-stated fuel usage was ...that the PHEVs use two different modes, the electric engine and the combustion engine". Well, so do non-plugin hybrids. I doubt they're saying that plug-in hybrids are worse than non-plugin, but you might guess that from the title.

The article states that Porsche PHEVs used 7 liters per 100 miles (33.6mpg), but Kia/Toyota/Ford/Renault used "85% less" (1.05L/100k or 223mpg... maybe about right if driven 75% from plug-in energy).

Porsche mentioned "different usage patterns". I can buy that a typical Prius owner is plugging-in every night, filling low-rolling-resistance tires to 54psi and driving like grandma, and a typical Porsche owner... isn't. If you want apples-to-apples, then compare a gas Corolla vs a Prius vs a Plug-in Prius, where the cars are from the same city/suburb, and similar owners (e.g.: no ubers, no regional sales reps).

This "study" is evaluating real-world use of one class of vehicles, and not other vehicle types; then using the dismal ways some people drive to imply that this particular class of vehicles is the problem.