My older daughter has a 2018 Toyota Prius Hybrid, and it has been a pretty good car for her. I’ve driven it — we actually had it on the farm for nine months while she was deployed — and it’s pretty nice. Her car is named “Veronica,” while our younger daughter’s car is named “Betty.”

From Business Insider:

Hybrid cars now have ‘very few compromises’ says Ford executive — and sales are booming

by George Glover | Saturday, March 23, 2024 | 6:03 AM EDT

• Sales growth for hybrid cars is outpacing growth for electric vehicles this year.

• Ford is one automaker reaping the benefits, with demand for its Maverick truck spiking.

• “Hybrids now have very few compromises compared to their gas alternatives,” Ford’s Andrew Frick said.

It’s shaping up to be a comeback year for hybrid cars — and that’s partly because they’re now nearly as good as their conventional vehicles, according to a Ford executive.

“Hybrids now have very few compromises compared to their gas alternatives,” Andrew Frick, head of Ford’s the Detroit automaker’s gas and hybrid vehicle division, told The Wall Street Journal this week.

If you have trouble accessing the Business Insider story, it is available for free here.

Hybrids have a traditional engine that charges batteries to power one or more electric motors, which makes them more efficient than gas-only vehicles. Many do not need to be plugged in like EVs, although some models can also be charged like one.

Frick’s comments come as demand for hybrid vehicles soars, partly due to drivers’ worries about charging electric cars. Those concerns have dented sales of EVs in recent months.

Another benefit of hybrids is that they’re a lot cheaper than their fully electric rivals. Buyers were paying $42,500 on average for hybrids in late 2023, according to data from Edmunds, compared with $60,500 for EVs and $47,500 for gas cars.

My daughter’s Prius gets about 49 MPG, which is pretty good, and she’s put a lot of miles on it, 163,000+ the last time I saw. No, it’s not zero emission, the way the global warming climate change activists, and the Biden Administration, are pushing, but it’s proven both economical and efficient. She can, if she chooses, run it in full electric mode, or leave it in normal operation, using the gasoline engine when the batteries need to be charged. Unlike some hybrids, her Prius does not have an exterior charging port, so she doesn’t have the option of using it as a straight electric vehicle, and plugging it in at night to recharge. That’s kind of a good thing, because it means that I don’t have to run a 220-volt, 50 ampere circuit to her garage to install a charging station. 🙂 But a plug-in option could be an advantage for many urban car buyers.

I already have full 200-amp service in my garage, so I could easily install a charging station here if I needed one.

My daughter’s Prius can easily make a several hundred mile journey, even a several thousand mile trip, and she doesn’t have to worry about needing to find a commercial charging station and spend an hour recharging every couple hundred miles. It’s a practical vehicle which gets great mileage and eliminates almost all of the concerns about fully electric vehicles. Just pull into a regular filling station, get a fresh tank of gasoline and a Wawa coffee, and back on the road in ten minutes.

Total electric vehicles are fine, for the right application: urban dwellers who will always be driving only around town, and who have garages or dedicated and secure parking areas in which they can safely install at-home vehicle chargers. But for many people, they simply are not practical, no matter what Joe Biden and the rest of the authoritarian climate activists say.