I don't know if this is justified or not, and I don't know whether the UK is ahead of or behind the UK on it. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44008098 But I wouldn't be too surprised to find an awful lot of hybrids - once their batteries are exhausted, are no better than any other car in a city environment, where pollution is felt most. But I also suspect that an awful lot of hybrid users are too bloody idle to ever plug their vehicles in, and run on petrol 100%, and I doubt whether any government measures can detect this or prevent it, however long they can run on batteries. I'm not blaming anyone here. If you come home from work after a hard day, driving through filthy weather and heavy traffic, what you want most is to sit down with a sherry or two before dinner and relax. Do you want to piss about with charging cables in the rain and the dark? You most certainly do not!
I have a BMW 530e and plug it in every night. It just becomes a regular thing -- walk into the garage after 8 PM and plug it in. In the morning, I go through the garage to get my daily newspaper off the driveway and unplug the car. Simple, easy and hard to forget, even for me. On the other hand, I almost never charge away from the house. It isn't worth it given the short commuter range.
This meme that PHEVs are not plugged in and run 100% on gasoline is a favorite hobby horse of EV-haters. If you think about it, it makes no sense, especially in the UK where the price of petrol is so high. Why would anyone in his right mind want to avoid taking the 15 or 30 seconds it takes to plug his car in at night, when doing so would save so much money in using electricity over the high price of petrol? Sure, EV-haters can find a few anecdotes of some idiot who drives a PHEV but never plugs it in. And so what? Idiots can be found in all walks of life, including PHEV drivers. If anyone doubts that in general, PHEVs are plugged in to charge, a visit to VoltStats.net should ease your mind. At the moment, their fleet of over 1900 Volts are reporting 66.4% of miles are powered by electricity and not gas. And those are not cherry-picked figures, either. Once you sign up for allowing your Volt to report statistics, it automatically uses the OnStar system to upload the data to VoltStats.net. So it's not like Volt owners are picking and choosing to report only the "good" numbers and not reporting the "bad" ones.
