Plug-in hybrids have been on the receiving end of an awful lot of critical kicks over the past 15 years. Ever since the first truly popular plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (the full official title, PHEV for short) was first introduced in the shape of the Mitsubishi Outlander, there has been a constant flow of criticism.
PHEV models enjoy exceptionally low official CO2 emissions, thanks largely to the fact that the official WLTP test allows them to start with a full battery. That being so, even big and heavy PHEVs can have official figures of less than 30g/km of CO2 coupled with fantastic — in every sense of the word — fuel economy of as little as 1.2-litres per 100km (235mpg for those of you still watching in black and white).
That, combined with the fact that PHEVs are designed to be driven mostly on electric power, reserving their petrol (or sometimes diesel) engines and fuel tanks for occasional longer journeys, makes them seem like an ideal combination. However myriad critics have hammered PHEVs, pointing out — rightly — that when you drive them long-haul on a flat main battery their weight and complication makes them very thirsty indeed. Worse still, there have been plenty of horror stories of PHEVs being traded in with a pristine charging cable still wrapped in plastic in the boot, suggesting that they had never once been charged (which seems to ignore the possibility that many might have been connected to chargers with built-in cables, but anyway…). The reputation of PHEVs sank so low that influential environmental think-tank Transport & Environment once dubbed PHEVs as ‘fake electric cars’ merely used as an eco-fig leaf by car makers.
That narrative could be up-ended by new battery technology developments. Chinese battery maker CATL — one of the world’s biggest, which counts the likes of MG, Ford, Volvo, BMW, and Tesla among its clients — says that it has developed a new PHEV-specific battery — called the ‘Freevoy’ — which can stretch the electric range of such cars to more than 400km.
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That would indeed be remarkable. The current best-performing EVs, such as the Range Rover P400e and the Skoda Superb, have electric ranges of around 125km on a full charge. That’s the official range, which means of course that the actual useable range will be less. Many PHEVs can claim only a 50km electric range, and often can only manage around 30km or so in real-world condition.
CATL’s news could change all of that utterly, with the company claiming that it can now offer PHEV technology “offering the convenience of one charge to power an entire week’s commute.”
What we don’t know yet is precisely how big and how bulky these batteries are. It’s conceivable that CATL has simply developed a bigger, more powerful PHEV battery and will then leave it up to car companies to decide how to squeeze it into the bodywork of a given vehicle, but the company has previously said that it is developing a new family of batteries which is vastly more energy-dense — and therefore smaller — than current batteries. That technology was originally aimed at creating batteries which would be sufficiently small, light, and powerful enough to be used by aircraft, but it’s certainly possible that CATL is using the same technology to design its new PHEV battery.
What we do know is that CATL says that it is also squeezing every possible drop of efficiency out of this battery design, thanks to new cathode designs, and a ten per cent improvement in the battery’s electric utilisation rate — the measure of how much of a battery’s total storage capacity can actually be used at any one time. The Freevoy battery uses a combination of lithium-ion and sodium-ion technology, working side-by-side in the same pack, to achieve its exceptional energy storage figures.
CATL’s new battery has another trick up its sleeve; ultra-fast charging. Again, CATL is being coy about releasing a full set of figures, but it has said that the Freevoy can charge up at a rate that allows an extra 280km of range to be added in just ten minutes, using a high-speed CCS DC charger.
Sounds like fiction? Not so, according to CATL. The battery maker says that it has already signed deals with several Chinese car makers — including Geely, Chery, and GAC — to use the design and that as many as 25 different models using the Freevoy battery are earmarked for production in 2025.
