- Cheap, long-range and fast-charging EVs are making range extenders irrelevant in China.
- Recent data suggests buyers are already moving away from EREVs to EVs.
- China's public charging network expanded significantly even just in the last year, making EV ownership easier.
Vehicles that combine battery power with internal combustion are seen as stepping stones in an eventual transition to all-electric vehicles. While many automakers once believed that hybrids and plug-in hybrids wouldn't be necessary forever, they seem to be sticking around a bit longer than many in the industry thought.
Right now, extended-range electric vehicles—EVs with gas engines that serve as generators to recharge their batteries—are a hot ticket. They promise the best of both worlds, with gas serving as a backup to boost range and aid towing and hauling for larger vehicles. But what if advances in battery technology and charging infrastructure make EREVs and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) obsolete?
China Daily highlights a dramatic change in the proportion of electrified vehicles purchased in China this year compared with 2024. It reveals that in November of last year, 57% of buyers chose a pure battery-powered EV, with 43% opting for an EREV instead.
That has changed significantly this year, with 73% going electric and 27% opting for EREVs, respectively, indicating a clear trend away from EVs with onboard gas generators.
There is less and less incentive for Chinese car buyers to choose an electrified model over a pure BEV. The country’s charging infrastructure is not only rapidly expanding, densifying and covering a wider area, but chargers are also getting quicker and more powerful.
There are public chargers in China today that offer 1 megawatt of power and commercially available passenger EVs that can take that kind of power and charge up in five minutes. We know they exist because we actually saw one in action and it blew us away.
The source notes that there are currently over 19 million active EV charging stalls (both AC and DC) in China, marking 52% increase over 2024. If the numbers are accurate, that is outstanding growth and it works out to two chargers for every five EVs currently on China’s roads.
Moreover, battery technology gets exponentially better every year. Many modern EVs offer at least 300 miles of range in the U.S., while more are coming with around 400 miles of range and beyond. Several automakers are working on solid-state batteries that could easily go well beyond that, while offering unprecedented fast-charging times. On a long enough timeline, modern batteries could make the gas engine feel obsolete.
Several Chinese automakers still launched new range extenders in 2025, or announced that such models are in development after seeing how successful they have been over the last couple of years. However, EREVs may already be past their popularity peak and on the decline as falling battery prices are making pure EVs cheaper.
EREV sales in China increased 218% year-over-year in 2021, 130% in 2022 and 70.9% in 2023. In other words, growth has been tapering off for the last few years.
There will still be a use case for EREVs in the future, but not for people living in and around cities with solid charging infrastructure. For people living further out in the country without a nearby charger, knowing there’s a combustion generator ready to kick in will alleviate a lot of anxiety.
Plug-in vehicle sales (EVs, EREVs, PHEVs and FCEVs) exceeded 12.26 million through November, showing an 18% year-over-year increase. November was a good month for EVs in China, with sales up 9% over the same month in 2024, while for PHEVs, it was the fifth consecutive month of decline. Overall, plug-in vehicles accounted for 59% of all passenger vehicle sales in China last month, up from 52% last year; 33% were pure BEVs.
China is a few years ahead of the West when it comes to EVs, so this trend that is only now becoming clear in China will also start to manifest here at some point. In the short term, we may see Chinese carmakers moving away from EVs with a gas generator or big-battery PHEVs, even though some local manufacturers that had only built pure electric vehicles announced they were trying hybridization too.
At the same time, the needs of buyers in China aren't identical to the needs of buyers in America or Europe. Hence, several Western automakers are working on EREVs that they plan to release soon.
Scout Motors says a lot more people showed interest in the Harvester range extender version of its upcoming trucks than in the pure EVs. BMW is also considering putting a combustion engine in its largest EVs, while Ford said it was mulling replacing the F-150 Lightning with an EREV after cancelling the pure electric model.
Hyundai is also working on EREVs for all of its brands, including Genesis, although it first plans to launch a new series of non-plug-in hybrid models.
America’s first true production range extender (if you don’t include the Chevy Volt, which was a PHEV, not a true range extender) will be the new Jeep Grand Wagoneer, which, in EREV guise, has a large 92-kilowatt-hour battery pack as well as a V-6 engine that can burn fuel to replenish range on the fly. However, Jeep is only targeting 150 miles of pure electric range, which isn’t great for a battery pack of that capacity—it looks like combining a big battery and a beefy V-6 in the same vehicle makes it heavy, and therefore not very efficient.
We may start to see an even larger divergence between the buying habits of car buyers from the U.S. and China, as one puts the brakes on electrification while the other goes full speed ahead and maintains course. Europe is somewhere in the middle, but it prefers plug-in hybrids over EREVs for now, although, just like China, it too will start moving away from these halfway house models when EVs become good and affordable enough to minimize compromise when switching from combustion.
