2' min read
2' min read
With the electric car crisis and the tightening of fringe benefit rates, plug-in hybrids, a type of electrified car that on the one hand is better, with autonomies of up to 100 km, but on the other hand only consumes little if one has the foresight to recharge when necessary, are gaining ground in fleets. And it is a practice that company car users most often do not do, with the result of increasing consumption and emissions, because they are cars that carry a ballast of batteries and motors. That said, the scenario, especially the one proposed by the increasingly strong Chinese car industry, is that of car technology with powertrains that fall into the Extended Electric Vehicle category. These are hybrid cars, in some cases also rechargeable from an external source, which have a peculiarity: traction is entrusted to electric motors (in some types exclusively) while a heat engine recharges the batteries. In practice, it is a car with an on-board generator that regenerates the batteries and does not require a charging station, solving the problem of recharging anxiety. The Reev's operating schemes are of various types (such as Nissan's e-power or Mazda's system with Wankel engine), but the Chinese technology used by Byd (DM-I) and Chery (super hybrid) with the Omoda and Jaecoo brands is gaining ground, where thanks to the mix of plug-in and on-board recharging, extremely high autonomies of up to 1,400 km can be reached with a full tank of combined petrol and electron energy. The emissions are not zero, but the overall efficiency is such that it guarantees very good fuel consumption (around 20 per litre with a medium-sized SUV like an Omoda 7 Super Hybrid). It is the pigeon's egg and is a technology we had already seen and appreciated over 15 years ago with the Chevrolet Volt, Opel Ampera and Bmw i3. The Reev architecture is now experiencing a second youth because on the one hand it has been improved and made more efficient by Chinese manufacturers (Stellantis cars with solutions developed by Leapmotor are expected to arrive), and on the other it is finding fertile ground because it responds well to the need to have low-emission company fleets, but without the problems of recharging with columns.
Obviously, a pure electric car is a completely different matter from the point of view of performance and efficiency, but now we also need to be pragmatic: we need cars that consume as much as a diesel and have low CO2 emissions, and Reev technology seems to respond adequately to this need as an alternative to traditional plug-in hybrids and in competition with new-generation hybrids where the state of the art for fleets seems to be the Mercedes solution that combines a turbodiesel engine with a rechargeable hybrid, but here we are on other levels of cost and refinement.
