We Must Prepare To Fight The Next PHEV Scam

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There’s a big disadvantage when an automotive manufacturer focuses on trucks and SUVs: low fleet MPG figures. Look at the EPA’s latest Automotive Trends Report, and the gap between automakers is glaring. Honda is sitting at the top of the leaderboard at 31.0 MPG, while GM is dragging along at the bottom near 22.9 MPG.

If you asked GM (or Stellantis, who’s right there next to GM) about this, they’d tell you that the math is just unfair. If you don’t consider that Americans want trucks and SUVs over smaller sedans and hatchbacks, you’d accidentally punish them for just selling what people actually want.

Fortunately (at least for these companies), the auto industry is enjoying a massive regulatory vacation. Federal emissions mandates have been softened, tax credits were gutted, and ICE-heavy automakers are perfectly happy stalling their EV transitions to keep pumping out profitable ICE trucks. They’ve idled plants and openly delayed their electric truck production to protect their near-term cash flow now that they’re not getting any help softening the blow of the transition.

But this vacation is about to end. Donald Trump has severely damaged the Republican brand, and if the upcoming 2026 midterms turn into a decisive bloodbath for the GOP, the auto industry is going to panic. They know that a massive political shift means the return of strict EPA emissions mandates. They also know that because they just spent the last two years hitting the brakes on their battery gigafactories, they won’t have the supply chain ready to build enough pure EVs to avoid staggering fines that would result in going back to the policies of 2024.

The day after election day 2026, the writing for all of this will be on the wall. Sure, Trump will still be squatting in the White House, and Republicans will still be in office for another couple of months, but talks with the incoming party will happen. And, the first thing out of the automakers’ lobbyist’s mouths will be four letters:

PHEV

The Mathematical “Cheat Code”

The logic automakers will pitch is simple battery math. To build one fully electric GMC Sierra EV or Chevy Silverado EV (basically the only trucks that can do everything ICE trucks do), you need a massive 170 or 200 kWh battery. But if you take that exact same pile of battery cells, you can build ten PHEVs. They will argue that spreading the battery wealth around is the fastest way to reduce emissions while they work to ramp up battery production.

But their real motivation is a massive regulatory cheat code.

The EPA calculates a company’s fleet average using a “harmonic mean.” By spreading their limited battery supply across ten trucks, an automaker suddenly wipes ten low-MPG V8s from their fleet math instead of just one. It provides a massive, instant compliance boost without forcing them to actually finish their pure-EV transitions. If it keep regulators happy, they might even be able to drag their feet on ramping up battery production.

The problem? Automakers just want the compliance math, not the capability. If regulators give them a free pass, they are going to build these vehicles as cheaply as possible. We’re going to get a flood of BS “compliance PHEVs”, trucks with a useless battery bolted to the frame just to secure a tax credit, where the gas engine roars to life the second you push the throttle more than half way.

But, at the same time, they’ll be telling the truth about battery production. No matter how much we want them to offer BEVs, the automakers will not be in a position to do it for at least 2-3 years.

If the auto industry wants a PHEV glide path, regulators need to draw a hard line in the sand right now. Here are six rules we need to establish to ensure the next generation of hybrid trucks are actual Extended Range Electric Vehicles (EREVs), not just regulatory shell games that would waste battery production.

Drawing The Hard Line: 6 Rules For Real EREVs

Rule 1: No “Gas at Full Throttle”

The electric motors need to do the actual work. We have to kill the loophole where heavy acceleration, high speeds, or steep grades automatically fire up the gas engine for mechanical assist. If you are pulling a travel trailer or backhoe up a mountain grade, the electric drivetrain needs to handle that torque independently. The gas engine’s only job should be turning a generator to feed the battery and MAYBE feed mechanical energy into a planetary gear (in an eCVT system) after the battery is depleted.

Rule 2: Close the “Cabin Heat” Loophole

A lot of current PHEVs fire up the gas engine the second the thermometer drops below 40°F just to heat the cabin. That completely vaporizes the EV mode for half the country all winter long. A true EREV needs to be mandated to use electric cabin heating (like a heat pump or robust resistive heater). Turning on the heater shouldn’t burn gas.

Rule 3: Stop Subsidizing Weak Hardware

We can’t reward automakers for putting tiny, useless batteries in massive trucks. Regulators need to set a strict 50-mile EPA-certified electric range minimum. Furthermore, we have to kill the agonizingly slow 3.3 kW onboard trickle charger. Mandate an 11 kW Level 2 minimum across the board, and if a truck battery is over 20 kWh, it needs DC Fast Charging so that someone can get meaningful range again during long travel days. If the battery is big enough to matter, it needs to charge fast enough to matter.

Rule 4: Include the Damn Cable

This one is infuriating: automakers are probably thinking about stripping the charging cables out of PHEVs to save a couple of bucks. A vehicle built for compliance math is highly correlated to an owner who never bothers to plug it in. We must mandate that every new EREV sale includes the necessary hardware to charge it from day one.

Rule 5: Geofencing for Green Zones

If these vehicles are going to get zero-emission subsidies, they need to act like it where it counts. Require software that automatically defaults the truck to pure EV mode when it crosses into a national park or a densely populated urban center (assuming there’s some electric range left, of course). Protect the local air quality automatically.

Rule 6: The Proportional “Earn-Out” Tax Credit

Finally, we have to fix the taxpayer subsidy. We shouldn’t be handing out full EV tax credits to people who lug massive batteries around as dead weight. But we also shouldn’t use a strict “electric mileage percentage” that unfairly penalizes a family for taking the truck on a summer road trip down Route 66.

Instead, split the credit 50/50. Buyers get half the money at the point of sale to make the truck affordable. They earn the remaining 50% as a refundable tax credit only if they actually plug the thing in.

To get the full back-end credit, the truck’s computer just has to prove it pulled the equivalent of 52 full battery charges from the grid that year. For a truck with a 20 kWh battery, that’s simply 1,040 kWh of grid energy annually. It’s an auditable, privacy-safe metric that doesn’t track where you go or even how many miles you drove. It’s achievable even if you only drive 2000 miles per year on electric power.

Make it a proportional sliding scale: if you only plug in enough to hit 90% of your target, you still get 90% of the credit. This protects the guy who uses the gas generator to tow his camper for a month, but forces him to use the truck as an EV for his daily commute the rest of the year.

Most importantly, it’s enough that someone will want to have access to charge at least once a week and to get them in the habit of actually plugging it in. If they can do that, there’s a nice $3750 reward they earn the following year.

The legacy automakers are going to beg for a PHEV compromise to save themselves from their own stalled supply chains. We can give them that glide path, but only if we build an impenetrable wall around it. They can build PHEVs, but only if they are true EVs when it matters most. Anything less is just another BS game at the taxpayer’s expense.

Featured image: a Jeep Wrangler 4xe. Image by Jennifer Sensiba.