Electric Vehicles

It is a hybrid, but there are categories of hybrid called Serial and Parallel. Parallel hybrids use both power from electric and ICE motors for traction while Serial hybrids use exclusively electric traction motors.

Serial hybrids were tried a few times but they were designed by committee and sucked ass. The first generation Chevy Volt was mentioned in other comments, but no one mentioned how awful it was to drive. The car was super cramped for your average american and it has an extremely undersized electric motor that only output 88 kW. But the gas economy was great - you could reasonably get 100 mpg.

Tesla was only just beginning to gain popularity and show that a BEV with a properly sized motor is a great vehicle. So, naturally, Chevy decided to take that lesson and ignore it when they redesigned the second generation Volt to be a parallel hybrid. Idiots.

Btw when purchasing a hybrid, consider that it has the drivetrain of two cars - twice as many failure points and it requires specialist mechanics. BEV *should* be 1/3 the parts and 1/5th the failure points of their PHEV counterparts.

That aside, there are a few other projects out there that are planning to add a range extending motor to a BEV. Notably the new Scout SUV is going to have that option. Honestly I'm pissed that we haven't seen this approach in more performance oriented vehicles where they could optimize to have the battery sized for roughly 50 km of high intensity driving with a lightweight generator to give it a normal range. I'd fucking love a Miata of that style. Instead all of the performance vehicles have a battery the size of a house and they make it a CUV. Uhg.