Except that the kind of long distance drivers you suggest in the first paragraph would get minimal benefit from a PHEV, since it only covers the first 40km or t

Except that the kind of long distance drivers you suggest in the first paragraph would get minimal benefit from a PHEV, since it only covers the first 40km or thereabouts. My wife and I only put like 10000km per year on our car, so I generally run down the battery fully on my PHEV and just touch a bit of the gas. That would barely make a dent in a multi-hour commuter's usage. The hard part is the short-term solutions are unpalatable: pushing back hard on oversized vehicles that are wasteful of fuel and hazardous to people who choose small, efficient, green options. A Hummer EV uses so much battery to build you could make three Nissan Leafs... but if you didn't make the Hummer EV, the driver would stick to a monstrous huge gas-burner. So fundamentally, fighting climate change in a world without plentiful batteries demands strong disincentive to driving oversized vehicles. Which is, of course, politically unpalatable because destroying the earth, obstructing visibility, and threatening your fellow drivers in a hypermassive oaf of a truck is freedom.