Misleading marketing of plug-in hybrids as electric vehicles
Channel: Scientists for Global Responsibility
Date: 20/10/2022

Presentation at SGR's Responsible Science conference, 19.10.2022, by Anna Jonsson (New Weather Sweden).

Plug-in hybrids are now intensively marketed as alter¬natives to electric cars. Sales have absolutely exploded in the past years, at least partly at the expense of cars without tail-pipe emissions. What appears to be a conscious greenwash strategy now blurs the boundary between fossil cars and electric cars. The hybrids are marketed with texts and images that depict them as electrically powered. In their statistics and communication, car industries group them with real electric cars under the concept rechargeable, the auto industry’s most com¬mon buzzword. The confusion has gone so far that the term “electric car” is now used for all kinds of hybrids and real electric cars in both advertising and news reporting. An important reason for this development is shortcomings in the methodology used to calculate emissions from plug-in hybrids, WLTP. The problem is compounded by the auto industry’s often cynical and irrespon¬sible marketing of plug-in hybrids. 

Anna Jonsson is a co-founder of New Weather Sweden. She has a broad experience of environmental policy and the environmental movement. She has been chairing Friends of the Earth Sweden as well as being a political advisor at the Ministry of the Environment.