Impact of battery weight and charging patterns on the economic and environmental benefits of plug-in hybrid vehicles

Paper authors: Ching-Shin Norman Shiau, Constantine Samaras, Richard Hauffe, Jeremy J. Michalek, from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburg, USA

OK, so you want to buy a plug-in hybrid. How much battery capacity do you pay for if you want to save gasoline, GHGs, and money? Does the extra battery weight bring down my mpg or vehicle efficiency? What set of policies or prices would change things? Carnegie Mellon University researchers have written a new paper on plug-in hybrids that will appear in the journal Energy Policy starting the discussion on these issues. Our paper, led by Professor Jeremy Michalek and with Design Decisions Laboratory Ph.D. Candidate C.S. (Norman) Shiau as the first author, looks at the tradeoffs between larger battery capacity and how often one charges the car to try to identify how these impact overall PHEV goals (e.g. reductions in gasoline, GHGs, and cost).