It could be said that 2024 was the year of the petrol-electric hybrid (HEV) car, even though it has been around in one form or another for 28 years.
Toyota pioneered it. Honda followed soon after. Others came much later. Each HEV saves on CO2 exhaust emissions.
HEVs totalled a never-before 34,736 registrations in New Zealand last year, or 27.0% of the overall 128,828 new vehicle numbers, according to the Motor Industry Association. In 2023, HEVs had 19.7%.
The leader of the HEV pack was the Toyota RAV4, with 10,457 sales, up a whopping 72.4% from 6001 in 2023. The other big HEV sellers were the Toyota Corolla, Suzuki Swift, Honda ZRV, and Honda Jazz.
The jump in overall HEV sales contrasts with the slump in both battery-electric (BEV) and plug-in (PHEV) numbers after the coalition government axed the taxpayer–funded clean car discount (CCD) at the start of 2024.
The previous Labour-led administration put CCD in place in 2022. In short, the scheme helped buyers to get into cars whose CO2 exhaust emissions didn’t stink up the joint. Those that did paid a penalty.
Labour’s bean counters figured CCD would pay for itself, by way of the penalty payments going a long way towards paying for the discounts. But CCD soon became lopsided and bled tens of millions of dollars.
Without it sales of 6748 BEV units last year plummeted 68.7% on the 21,611 registered under CCD in 2023. Similarly, PHEV numbers fell 61.3%, from 9005 in 2023 to 3484 last year.
The shrinking of both sectors – albeit in a difficult economic year – proves that sales go nowhere fast without government incentives. The records show that, all up, BEVs and PHEVs account for just over 2% of the country’s total light passenger fleet.
Perhaps there is another reason for the growth in HEV sales – that car buyers are listening more to automotive specialists’ advice than politicians, BEV lobbyists, and net-zero zealots.
Take Toyota’s 1:6:90 rule as a sounding board. It is one of the reasons both it and its luxury arm Lexus keep sticking to mostly HEV models.
Toyota’s chairman Akio Toyoda believes sales of BEVs will peak at around 30% of the global passenger fleet. He has been saying so for some time, based on analysis of the future transportation wants of the developed world against those of the under-developed world.
So why rush headlong into producing BEVs when, by Toyoda’s reckoning, around 70% of the world will likely be driving something else. It was only months ago that Toyota slashed its 2026 target for BEVs by 30%, from 1.5 million to one million.
The 1:6:90 rule works like this: rare earths (lithium, cobalt etc) needed to build 1 BEV could instead be used to make 6 PHEVs or 90 HEVs.
Take the BEV Tesla Model S as an example. It contains around 60kg of lithium in a battery pack that weighs around 540kg. The pack itself is more than half the weight of an eight-man All Black scrum.
The battery set-up in a PHEV is smaller, lighter and therefore doesn’t have as much lithium. So 60kg of lithium could be cut six ways to build six PHEVs.
In turn, the battery in a petrol-electric HEV is very much smaller again. Toyota’s boffins figure the 60kg of lithium needed for a BEV could be cut 90 ways for a HEV.
American scientist Gill A. Pratt is the CEO of Toyota’s brains trust. He and his team delivered the 1:6:90 metric. Pratt defines it as a carbon return on investment.
“It’s grams of CO2 saved, divided by grams of lithium invested in vehicles,” Pratt told US critical minerals expert Peter Bryant on the sidelines of an energy forum last September.
“Different kinds of vehicles have radically different carbon returns on investment compared to each other,” Pratt said. “For example, those 90 HEVs will save around 45 times more CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere than the one BEV.
“So, while each individual HEV isn’t quite as good as a BEV, because we can make so many more with the same amount of lithium, the carbon return on investment makes more sense.
“PHEVs, which are a mixture of both, are incredibly practical. Six PHEVs save around five-and-a-half times as much CO2 as a single BEV.”
• The latest step towards a cleaner NZ passenger fleet is the clean car standard (CCS). It came into force three weeks ago and is designed to get importers to land cleaner burning vehicles. It shares its emissions guidelines with a similar scheme in Australia. Fines are levied on vehicles that don’t meet required CO2 emissions standards.