BRIDGING THE GAP
The dawn of the jet age, the point at which turbine-driven flight had become unquestionably the way forward, came just as piston-powered planes reached their peak. This meeting of eras led aircraft engineers to ease the transition with hybrid, mixed-format designs such as the Navy’s FR-1 Fireball and the Air Force’s B-36 Peacemaker, the latter of which had six 28-cylinder engines and four turbojet engines. We sit at a similar inflection point in the automotive industry today, when modern plug-in hybrid cars and SUVs like the 2021 Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV and 2021 Toyota RAV4 Prime stand as analogues for those hybrid aircraft, bridging the purely internal combustion powertrains of the past and the electric propulsion of the future.
Those early hybrid airplanes leaned on their piston engines for efficiency and instantaneous acceleration, and their jets provided speed. The latest plug-in hybrids sport electric motors for instant thrust and efficiency while their gas engines provide for long-distance cruising. In other words, whether in a plane or a car, a hybrid system aims to provide the best of all worlds.
The Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV (represented here by a top-spec GT model) and the Toyota RAV4 Prime (a loaded XSE) are in many ways the most relevant of the roughly 30 plug-in hybrids on the market today. Why? Simple: They’re SUVs, that most popular of body styles. Our pair is in an exclusive class; they and the Ford Escape PHEV, Jeep Wrangler 4xe, and Subaru Crosstrek Hybrid compose the mainstream PHEV SUV roster. But because they’re SUVs, people might actually want to buy them, unlike loathsome Toyota
