Comparative Analysis of Technical Route and Market Development for Light-Duty PHEV in China and the US

China and the US have become the world's largest plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) markets. Powertrain architecture is the framework of PHEV technology which represents its technical route. The research on the market development and technical route of Chinese and American PHEV is helpful to grasp the internal law of the global PHEV market and technology situation, and thus is significant to lay out a development strategy and technical route but has not been sufficiently studied. Therefore, an evaluation method of three dimensions combining market sales, powertrain architectures and performance indexes was proposed for comparative analysis, and PHEV mainstream architectures were put forward. Besides, qualitative evaluation levels from nine dimensions were built for architecture analysis, and fuel consumption to curb weight (FC2CW) as an indicator was introduced for economy evaluation. Some conclusions can be drawn: (a) The most mainstream architecture in sales volume is four-wheel drive (4WD) Bridge, and that in models' amount is P2 in China, while those respectively are PS and P2 in the US. This reflects that a difference exists between the choice of the consumers and that of the automakers, and another difference also exists between the two countries. (b) With the phasing down of subsidies, the single-motor parallel architecture may become the first choice of China's next technical route, while the 4WD Bridge will still be the main architecture for sports utility vehicles (SUVs) or sports car. (c) Among the models of the top five sales, the types and sales of SUVs in China are significantly more, however, the fuel economy rankings of theirs in the US are relatively better. (d) It is difficult to distinguish which architecture has the absolute best economy, but the fuel economy of the series type in the two markets is not very good.