Toyota Details Research Plans For Plug-In Prius, Won't Lease Batteries

Unless we are going back to a future of nuclear energy or moving towards solar, one need only look up the Rankine cycle focusing on the efficiency of electricity production and losses in transmission of a system that is already overtaxed to realize it makes no sense

The poor efficiency of electrical generation and transmission is a red herring circulated by petrol enthusiasts. Consider a petrol engine. It is a large mass of metal that must be heated up and kept hot whilst blowing air and vapourised petrol through it. It must continuously pump a vacuum to vapourise the fuel, and it must pump oil, and turn lots of gears and shafts. Have you ever tried to push a car that is in gear but switched off? Consider an electric car. It has no gears, no need to heat up or keep hot. It uses no energy at the stop lights, and it re-charges when slowing down or going down hill. An electric car will use one tenth of the energy of a petrol car in town driving, and perhaps one fifth in mixed driving. Ten percent electrical transmission loss (of one tenth of the energy, ie one hundredth) is irrelevant by comparisson. These obvious points are being conveniently ignored by the majority of people who are naturally resistant to change. More upsetting, is the fact that the technical press are generally not trying to expose a seemingly inconvenient truth.

Another key factor, as stated in the article, is that they are plugged in overnight, when power consumption is off-peak. There is a lot of room for plug-ins overnight with current (pun intended) power generation capacity.