Don't buy a hybrid!

Published on 18th August, 2026.

The most common question I get from people considering a new or second-hand car is, “Should I buy a hybrid or an EV?” My answer is always, “Don’t buy a hybrid, go straight for the EV!” 

I understand not everyone can afford to go out and buy a new EV, and there are a small number of use cases where an EV does not quite make sense yet. In that case my advice is to hold onto your car until you can either afford an EV or find one that suits your needs. Don't buy another petrol or diesel car and lock yourself into buying liquid fuel for years to come.

My brother and his mates always spring to mind when thinking about the last people to adopt EVs. They love their 4WDs and actually use them to travel to places like Cape York and do hard core trips such as crossing the Simpson Desert. They are starting to see the potential, but it may be a while until they can do everything with an EV.

More often than not, people have a second car for running around town and an EV makes perfect sense in this situation, leaving the gas guzzler for those times you actually need it. Outside of those rare use cases, I believe EVs have become a no-brainer. They are simply a better and cheaper car to own all round.

Before getting into the 3 main reasons why you should not buy a hybrid, I am obviously an EV fan and admit to having some very strong opinions on this topic, but I will back up my statements with links to solid evidence, stories from my 7 years of EV ownership and 3 years of being an EV journalist.

If you are one of those people sitting on the fence or maybe leaning towards a hybrid, please hear me out. If you reach the end of this article and I haven’t made you think just a little, or swayed your opinion one bit, then I would love to hear why you still think a hybrid is the way to go.

Hybrids are actually the worst, not the best, of both worlds

People considering hybrids often think they are the best of both worlds, allowing them to drive around town using very little petrol in EV or hybrid mode most of the time, and not worrying about charging on long road trips. This is utter greenwashing crap, spouted by companies like Toyota who want to keep selling hybrids for years to come because they have not committed to the inevitable transition ahead of us.

The funny thing is, people who do a lot of driving are the ones who actually benefit the most from switching to an EV. The charging and maintenance costs are far lower for an EV compared to internal combustion cars, so the more you drive the more you save.

Two motivations could potentially explain behaviour like this from Toyota. Firstly, they would prefer to sell you a hybrid so they can keep making money from servicing and spare parts down the road. They don’t have enough production capacity in their factories if their customers decided to all switch to EVs quickly, again they have not committed.

I’ve picked on Toyota on purpose as they are the worst offenders, trying to delay the EV transition using underhand tactics such as promising solid-state batteries for years, and taking unfair advantage of their power within the industry to weaken fuel efficiency standards like Australia’s National Vehicle Efficiency Standards (NVES). Thankfully, they have basically given up on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

Some of the other legacy automakers including Hyundai and Kia could also do more though. I see so many ads for Kia and Hyundai hybrids instead of their excellent EVs. The Hyundai Ioniq 6 N is one of my favourite EVs of all time, yet it barely gets a mention anywhere.

Just to be clear, my recommendation against hybrids also includes plug-in hybrids, not just mild hybrids. A couple of years ago I drove a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV and it was a horrible experience after owning an EV with good range. I felt like I had to charge the Outlander multiple times a day, otherwise it would drop out of EV mode and consume over 10 L/100 km, worse than an efficient petrol car.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at the study of over 1 million hybrid vehicles in Europe based on real world fuel consumption data. The conclusion was that PHEVs use 3 times the amount of fuel promised by the manufacturers.

PHEVs or extended range electric vehicles (EREVs) with much longer range are now available, but this introduces another problem. I have spoken with multiple PHEV owners including one person with a BYD Sealion 6 who was very careful to charge regularly and used EV mode all the time. However, one day they went on a longer trip and actually broke down because the petrol had gone stale and the car refused to start the petrol engine.

Talking about this situation with a Geely salesperson recently, they said the car should detect this and start burning the old fuel before it goes stale, but then owners complain their PHEV is burning petrol when they don’t actually want it to.

Some people worry about EVs catching fire, but the statistics on this topic are pretty clear. Battery electric vehicles are somewhere between 20 times to 100 times less likely to catch fire compared to an internal combustion engine vehicle, while hybrids are in fact twice as likely to catch fire than a regular non-hybrid vehicle.

In terms of maintenance, hybrids are much more complex than a BEV. An electric drivetrain has roughly 20 moving parts vs 2000 in a combustion engine, so there is much more that can go wrong, plus they require more regular maintenance like oil changes and filter replacements.

A great example is from my grandpa George who had a small collection of veteran cars. His 1912 Baker Electric still had its original electric motor and was by far the most reliable, it worked every time without a fuss. In contrast, some of his petrol cars would often take hours or days of fiddling around to get them going briefly before they sputtered out again.

One common misconception about EVs is that the battery will need replacing at some point. However, more and more research is coming out concluding that EV batteries will probably outlast the rest of the car. After that they will be repurposed for stationary storage, and then recycled to recover the critical minerals to make new batteries.

Solid evidence is hard to find, but hybrid batteries are likely to need replacing much sooner, because they are smaller and therefore cycle much more often. For example, a circa 1 kWh battery in a Toyota Corolla hybrid can accumulate 1-2 cycles per day under normal driving scenarios. Cycling an EV battery this much would take 500 - 1000 km, far more than the average person drives each day.

Circling back and asking people on the fence why they are considering a hybrid, the answer usually seems to be related to range and charging, which I’m happy to say have been a solved problem for a while now, unless you do regular trips through remote and regional Australia.

Range and charging are solved problems

When I worked for Polestar the biggest concern from potential customers was how they were going to charge their new car. Whenever an owner came back to visit, they would always tell us that their fears simply melted away after a week or 2, and charging was just so easy.

Ask any EV owner and you’ll get the same answer, especially if they have off-street parking, it’s no harder than charging your phone or laptop. Even without off-street parking, I know several EV owners who are perfectly happy with kerbside or pole-mounted charging and the occasional DC fast charge as necessary.

Charging in apartments is also getting easier, there are now at least 4 specialist companies that are happy to take care of the whole negotiation process with strata. These companies can arrange smart powerpoints to be installed in every parking space starting from roughly $1,000 per lot:

• Ready Steady Plug

• NOX Energy

• Alchemy Charge

• Combined Energy

When it comes to range, my test of the Tesla Model 3 Long Range Rear-Wheel Drive helps to illustrate what is possible with an EV you can already buy, not some future car with a mythical solid state battery. This particular Model 3 is advertised with up to 750 km of WLTP range, my test confirmed it is easily capable of over 600 km at highway speeds.

During this test I departed from Alexandria with 100 % state of charge, stopped in Canberra for lunch and then came back to my house in Sydney with 12 % remaining after a distance of 580 km. The same car can also drive from Sydney to Melbourne with a single 15 minute stop half way at Holbrook as shown below.

This type of driving is certainly not recommended, but it does prove that EV range is no longer the limiting factor, it is your biology that dictates when and how long you need to stop. I like to think of it as charging while you stop, rather than stopping to charge, and your trip should not take any longer than it would in a combustion vehicle.

If you are still not convinced, several EVs with even longer range have arrived since or will be here soon. BMW’s iX3 goes up to 805 km, or their i3 sedan even further with 900 km. Volvo has just released the EX60 here, there is a version of that car available overseas offering up to 810 km that should come in the future.

When you do need to stop and charge quickly, technology is already rolling out in China that charges EVs from 10 - 97 % in 9 minutes (BYD Flash Charging) or 10 - 98 % in 6.5 minutes (CATL Shenxing). CATL also says the battery retains > 90 % health after 1,000 of these charge cycles, so no, it won’t kill the battery either.

Even without crazy fast charging, my old Model 3 with a max DC charging speed of 250 kW was already too fast sometimes. I’ve been in situations where I was half way through a quick lunch and got notified the car was ready to continue, so I had to run off and move it. Freeing up the charger for others is good etiquette and also avoids idle fees when the charging stations are busy.

Before moving onto the final reason not to go hybrid, in my 7 years of EV ownership and countless long trips in my old Model 3 including a trip to Tasmania, I have only had 2 negative experiences on road trips.

The first of these was driving from Sydney to Melbourne on boxing day 2022. We arrived at Wodonga Supercharger around lunchtime to find a queue and had to wait 40 minutes to plug-in. This was made worse by the fact that old Superchargers dropped from 130 kW to 65 kW when all stalls were used. Since then, Tesla added 12 charging bays across the river in Albury and several other locations from other charging brands are available north or south.

Secondly, driving back from Melbourne in a BYD Seal that was not compatible with Tesla Superchargers, which is the most reliable and now also the cheapest charging network. That trip took 14 hours and I was definitely over it by the time I got home at 10:30pm. It was a frustrating experience as we encountered several broken or slow chargers. BYD has since fixed the compatibility issue with their vehicles, so it shouldn’t happen again.

Having said all this, we will definitely need to continue rolling out EV chargers at a rapid pace to cope with increased demand from all those new EVs coming. This is especially true in rural and regional areas where public chargers are not as common yet, to encourage Australians living in or travelling to these areas to make the leap.

Environmental impact, hybrids still burn fossil fuel

Last but not least there is the environmental impact of burning fossil fuels for transport, no matter what sort of hybrid you are talking about, it will burn fuel at some point. If you don’t believe climate change is real, then you’re probably in the wrong place, or if you’re still here you probably aren’t going to believe what I say anyway. 

There is such a huge body of scientific evidence these days that arguing against the existence of climate change or the human contribution from burning fossil fuels is like saying the earth is flat, and ignoring everything science says about it being round.

Climate change is not some far off problem, it is already here and now, causing catastrophic wildfire seasons, unprecedented heat waves across the globe and killing and/or impacting millions of lives. Still on the flat earth analogy with these impacts in mind, climate change deniers are like astronauts that have been to space and seen the earth from above, but somehow manage to convince themselves it is still flat.

I came across a powerful LinkedIn post by Sarah Aubrey recently, with the simple message of “Context is everything.” This graph illustrates temperature change in Australia since 1880 compared to the average between 1961 - 2010. It was taken from the University of Reading’s #ShowYourStripes, and I’ve copied Sarah’s annotations below.

Unfortunately, there is also clear evidence that things will get much worse before they start to get better. Cheer up though, the good news is that individuals like you and me can actually do something about it! 

As Saul Griffith says in his book, The Big Switch, 42 % of emissions come from households and a further 23 % from the commercial and small business sector. Therefore, if we choose to replace our old or broken appliances with efficient electric alternatives when the time comes, this will remove 65 % of our carbon emissions.

In Australia, our biggest source of carbon emissions is still electricity generation, 146 Mt CO2-e in 2025 to be exact, followed by transport with 101 Mt CO2-e. Emissions from electricity generation are falling faster than transport due to the renewable energy transition. 

Transport emissions were rising until recently, now starting to just bend downwards. Switching to an EV is therefore an important step to reduce your own emissions, and it comes with many benefits such as being cheaper, easier and more fun to drive as well. 

Conclusion

I think those are some compelling reasons to avoid buying a hybrid vehicle of any sort. For me it was the performance and technology of electric vehicles that got me hooked on EVs initially, but the far superior driving and ownership experience as well as the environmental benefits are what really sealed the deal, and pushed me to become the advocate I am today.

Electric vehicles are clearly the future, just like email was when it started to take over in the 1990s. The fax machine was an awkward stepping stone technology that I’m sure nobody misses today, but try living for a while without your email.

So, if you have kids, grandkids or younger people in your life, I urge you to really think about their future and do whatever you can to look after the planet. When it comes time to buy your next car, skip the fax machine and go straight for an EV.