why not plug in a hybrid car?

It seems to me that it would be more efficient to recharge the battery by plugging it in to an outlet,rather than having it be coompletely charged by the fuel power source. wouldn"t it even by more environmentally friendly and cheaper?

 

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They can do that and are doing that with certain cars today. The problem is that it takes over 4 hours to get a good charge to the depleted batteries and 8 hours to completly recharge them. Then where do you recharge them if you go to work? There are no outlets at the parking places I've parked at. That's another reason that I don't like batteries for a power source. The cost for those batteries is about 400.00 each or more and you need at least 15 of them. After about 2 years or less the batteries have to be replaced so where do you dispose of them ?

 

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Not to mention the weight of the batteries.

 

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Nope. It definitely wouldn't be more environmentally friendly and cheaper. If it were, why not just get rid of the gasoline engine and only use the motor and batteries? Then it would be a zero emissions vehicle. This has all been done before. More than 50 percent of our (US) electricity is derived from burning coal.

Though it may seem counterintuitive a regular gas car is much cleaner than an electric car. Not to mention more convenient and efficient. You don't have to charge them and most of them can go quite far on a single tank of gas. Battery powered electric cars just don't make sense yet.

But hybrids do

With most cars, there is a lot of energy wasted because to have good acceleration, you need a big engine. But do they really need to be so big and inefficient when the car is just cruising? No, it wastes gas.

With hybrids, you don't need big beefy engines because of the electric motor assist. And when the cars are cruising on the highway, the engine may have surplus energy to charge the battery since it hardly takes any power to keep these things going with the drag coefficients they put out. Not to mention the battery charges when they brake. So it would definitely be redundant to try and plug one into a wall. But I was thinking that maybe they could paint the cars with solar paint and the electricity from that could go to the battery and make the car less engine dominant. (Use less fuel or better acceleration)

 

why not plug in a hybrid car

There are some states in the vicinity of electric power whose cost per killowatt is one fifth of the other areas. I believe that there are some regions where electricity is cheaper after midnight, becaue the water would just flow over the falls anyway. In this way 100 percent would be hydroelectric and not fossile fuel and this spillage would be put to useful work.In any case coal is far cheaper than gas