Untangling confusion about hybrids

Should Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) be unsuitable for your needs, you might consider a 'Hybrid' vehicle. These cars combine a combustion engine with electric motors and batteries.

Yet, which Hybrid should you choose? There are Macro Hybrids, Micro Hybrids, Mild Hybrids, Range Extender Hybrids, Plug-in Hybrids, Self-Charging Hybrids, Series Hybrids, Parallel Hybrids, Series-Parallel Hybrids - and more. This is before car manufacturer marketing departments add their stamps to the technological quagmire. No wonder buyers are confused...

All you need to remember, at the time of writing, is that hybrids can be categorised into three groups:

1. LOW VOLTAGE HYBRIDS - (under 48 volts)

These vehicles use electrification to improve fuel efficiency and exhaust emissions but cannot be driven in electric-only mode.

As they employ fewer than 48 volts, these hybrids present no high-voltage life-threatening safety risks to garages and repairers.

2. HIGH VOLTAGE HYBRIDS - (over 48 volts)

These vehicles can be driven in an electric-only mode, with the combustion engine switched off.

Their drive systems operate over 48 volts (usually many hundreds of volts), meaning that technicians should be qualified in dealing with potentially lethal high-voltage direct currents.

3. THE INBETWEENERS

So, high-voltage hybrids can be propelled by electricity but low-voltage hybrids cannot. Yet, as technology is moving fast, so too are definitions. At the time of writing (January 2023), we should consider a third class of new low-voltage hybrids that can move under electric power.

Currently, the only sub 48 volt hybrids that possess electric-only propulsion are those made by Stellantis. These vehicles comprise 1.5-litre hybrid versions of Fiat's 500X and Tipo, the Jeep Renegade/Compass and Alfa-Romeo's Tonale. Yet, their low-voltage architectures and small batteries mean that their electric-only range is very limited, compared to the more powerful and expensive high-voltage hybrid

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