Yahoo Finance Are Hybrids Good for Long-Distance Driving?
Hybrid powertrains are designed to save fuel, so it should follow that hybrids save fuel on the highway compared to their internal-combustion-only counterparts. While this is generally true, unfortunately it's not that simple. For starters, most hybrids have worse fuel economy at highway speeds than they do around town. And different types of hybrids, including mild hybrids and plug-ins, have their own characteristics and advantages. We'll highlight the hybrid's idiosyncrasies and explain everything you need to know about driving long distance in one.
Battery Performance over the Long Haul
The electric portion of a hybrid powertrain is most active in the city. Because the electric motor or motors are designed to assist the gas engine rather than replace it, they're not as powerful, making them most helpful when small amounts of power are needed. This includes easy acceleration and trundling along at low speeds. A hybrid will shut off its engine in these situations or use the electric motors' output to augment the internal-combustion side of the powertrain, saving fuel in the process. Hybrids also capture energy under braking that would normally be lost as heat to the friction brakes, and then that energy gets used as part of the speed-up-slow-down loop of city driving. As a result, the hybrid's battery is being charged and discharged pretty frequently.
On the highway, it's a different story. Ignoring slowdowns for traffic or construction zones, highway driving is a steady-state affair, or it should be if you have your cruise control set. Because of this, there aren't many opportunities for the hybrid system to harvest energy under deceleration. The hybrid system doesn't get the day off, though; many systems will run the gas engine at a higher speed than needed, but one that's efficient, and use the extra power to run a motor-generator that can then feed power to the battery or directly to a traction motor. All of this is to say, if you're worried about highway driving being detrimental to a hybrid system's longevity, don't be. If anything, high-speed driving is easier on a hybrid's battery, because it's not being charged and discharged as frequently.
As for mild hybrids, their mildness—small motor, tiny battery—means they have little effect on range or fuel economy. Mild-hybrid systems do their best work in the city, where they can recoup some energy when decelerating and then use that smidge of captured energy to give the internal-combustion powertrain a small—or mild—boost. And like a full hybrid powertrain, mild-hybrid systems restart the gas engine after pauses.
For plug-in hybrids, the story is similar to that of the non-plug-in full hybrid. Plug-ins have an added bonus of some all-electric range courtesy of a larger battery and a way to plug it into the grid. Once the battery's charge is depleted, however, so is the vehicle's electric-only range. You might get a couple dozen "free" miles at the start of your trip, but then the car will act like a normal hybrid until you can sufficiently replenish the battery, either by selecting a drive mode that tells the engine to spin up the electric motors and, in turn, refill the battery or by plugging in when you've stopped for a bit.
Fuel Economy: Hybrids on the Highway
Even though hybrids thrive in city driving, it's not all bad news on the highway. In general, hybrid systems provide a fuel-economy boost in steady-state, high-speed driving as well.
Take the 2025 Honda Civic Hybrid as an example; it uses the same 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine as the nonhybrid Civic but swaps in a hybrid transmission packing a pair of electric motors. The nonhybrid model's best fuel-economy ratings are 32 mpg in the city and 41 on the highway. Adding the hybrid gear raises both figures, which come in at 50 mpg in the city and 47 on the highway. So while the city number gets a bigger boost and surpasses the highway figure thanks to the hybrid system, the hybrid has a fuel-economy benefit regardless of where and how it's driven.
Plug-in hybrids are biased more toward efficiency on short trips, when they can use the greater capacity of their batteries and sometimes not even call up the gas engine. The plug-in's larger, and therefore heavier, battery going along for the ride has its drawbacks. Once its all-electric range drops to zero, the system acts like any other hybrid, with the extra weight of the battery doing no favors to overall efficiency. The Toyota Prius has maximum fuel-economy ratings of 57/56 mpg city/highway. The Prius Prime plug-in hybrid, however, is rated at up to 53/51 mpg city/highway. So while that larger battery isn't being harmed by driving long distances, its presence does have an impact.
Hybrid Range: Your Mileage May Vary
Hybrids skirt the EV issue of range anxiety because you can always stop and fuel up. But how often will you need to do that? Just like with a gas-only car, driving range depends on what kind of fuel economy you're getting and how large the gas tank is.
EPA range figures, the ones you see on a car's window sticker, are based on the combined city/highway fuel-economy figure, which isn't very helpful in this case. To find the highway range for a particular car, instead take its highway fuel-economy figure and multiply that by the tank's volume in gallons.
Using our Prius examples, this yields a maximum of about 630 miles of range on the highway for the non-plug-in, which is the product of 11.3 gallons times 56 mpg. The Prius Prime has a slightly smaller fuel tank at 10.6 gallons. Multiplying that by its 51-mpg highway figure gives us a hybrid range of about 540 highway miles. But if you add the Prime plug-in's 44 miles of all-electric range, it can cover about 584 highway miles with a topped-off tank and a fully charged battery. The problem is, unless you plan to stop for the four hours it takes to replenish the battery every time you refuel, the range for subsequent tanks on a road trip will be limited to the 540-mile figure. These totals vary from model to model, of course.
Long-Distance Driving Is No Problem for Hybrids
To sum things up, hybrids have no issues with long-distance driving. They avoid the range anxiety of EV ownership, as well as EVs' long recharge times, which keeps things moving swiftly when you're trying to pile on highway miles. And while plug-ins are at a slight disadvantage compared to non-plug-in hybrids, they still sip fuel, saving you money at the pump.
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