Hybrid vehicles here to stayThere’s been a marketing push lately for hybrid vehicles from the major car companies. This means that production ramp-up in the short to medium term is for hybrids. However, recent modelling studies have revealed that fully electric vehicles, in some cases, can have larger carbon footprints than gasoline powered vehicles when considering their full life-cycle. This is because it takes a lot of energy to mine and manufacture a lithium-ion battery and most countries’ power grids (e.g. China, India, Japan, Germany, US, etc) are still dominated by coal and natural gas. The overall energy mix in these power grids is unlikely to change drastically anytime soon, thus in most countries EVs will be at least partly powered by coal. The US, Germany and several other European countries, are, in fact, actually starting to shut down some of their most reliable carbon-free energy sources (nuclear), if you can believe that. Hybrids on the other hand, are independent of the power grid, and thus have no chance of being powered by coal. When life-cycle carbon footprint models are applied to hybrid vehicles, it is very likely that hybrids will beat both EV and ICE vehicles in most countries. The only exceptions will be those few jurisdictions where energy grids are dominated by renewable energy (e.g. Norway, Quebec). Hybrids are also cheaper than fully electric vehicles because they have much smaller battery packs and don’t have the added inconveniences of EVs (takes longer to charge (fill-up), angst of finding a charging station, plugging and unplugging, reduced range in cold temperatures, catching fire).
The prognosis; hybrid vehicles are here to stay, not just in the short to medium term, but in the long term as well. All good for palladium, as Pd loads in hybrid vehicles are even higher than in gasoline engines.
The Mookster