The current trend of the Automotive market is to create hybrid engines. Let's try to understand what it is and how convenient they are on the economic side to buy.

The current Automotive market is increasingly moving towards concepts related to electricity. However, the path to having 100% electric cars within our country is very long. For this reason, the various automotive manufacturers have devised a conversion path by introducing the so-called hybrid cars in the first place.

Conceptually, a hybrid car is a car driven and powered both by a thermal engine, but also by an electric engine. When we talk about a thermal engine we mean both a petrol engine, but also a diesel engine. To tell the truth, petrol engines are in practice the ones that are mostly considered within hybrid cars.

In fact, there are very few hybrid cars with diesel and electric engines.

Conceptually the hybrids are of different types and the ones that are currently interesting to know are the so-called plugins.

Plug-in hybrids are vehicles that allow you to recharge a specific electric motor at a charging station, whether domestic or public. In this way, according to the car manufacturers, it would be possible to travel from 50 to 70 km only in electric mode.

In other words, as soon as we start the car we have the possibility to travel in total silence and without polluting emissions for 50 or 60 km. Plug-in hybrid cars are perfect for all those who make very short journeys within the city and hardly ever travel over 50 or 60 km during the day.

As soon as these distances are exceeded, and the force of the electric motor is canceled out, the petrol engine starts working.

Obviously, you can also choose to manage the car in a combined way, that is to drive a car that does not immediately use all the electric power and then switch to petrol, but which contemplates the use of the electric motor in order to support the power of the petrol engine.

In a much simpler way, the electric motor allows you to make a constant saving in petrol or diesel consumption along the entire route.

Electric motors also have the ability to recharge thanks to the so-called regenerative braking. In fact, if we are on a downhill road or we are inside the city and we use the brake very frequently, thanks to a complex system that is defined as regenerative braking, the electric motor recharges.

Clearly it is never something definitive, and in fact it has a limited datum as its scope. In simpler terms, the electric motor cannot self-recharge with regenerative braking alone.

When is it convenient to buy a hybrid car plugin? It is convenient whenever we obviously have the possibility to recharge the batteries for free, as we have a photovoltaic system installed on the roof of our apartment or our detached house.

If, on the other hand, we have a live cost for recharging, we must consider how much it is convenient for us to recharge the car at our home. Surely the cost of charging at our home is lower than at public charging stations. We must therefore inquire at our electricity supplier and understand the cost for each kWh that must be used to recharge our car.