About the data and methodology

PluginRisk shows how much fuel plug-in hybrid cars use in everyday driving, model by model. All figures come from one public source and are calculated the same way for every model.

The data

Since 2021 every new car sold in the EU must record its lifetime fuel use and distance with an on-board fuel consumption meter (OBFCM). Carmakers and national authorities report these readings to the European Environment Agency (EEA), which publishes them each year. We use the file 2024_Cars_Raw.csv from the EEA dataset “Real-world CO2 emissions from new cars and vans, reporting year 2024”, which holds 10,810,654 car records from the EU-27, Norway and Iceland.

How we calculate

  • We keep plug-in hybrids (fuel mode “P”) that the EEA marks as used in its own calculation and that have at least 1,000 km recorded.
  • We group cars by make and commercial name, merging spelling variants and trim names of the same model (for example "Kuga", "Kuga ST-Line" and "Kuga Vignale"). Merged models add up the underlying totals; nothing is averaged twice. Old addresses of merged models redirect to the new page.
  • Real-world fuel use is total fuel consumed divided by total distance, across all cars of the model.
  • Official fuel use is derived from the average official WLTP CO2 figure of those cars (CO2 ÷ 23.1 for petrol, ÷ 26.4 for diesel).
  • Distance with engine off is the distance driven in charge-depleting mode with the engine off, divided by total distance. Some records report more engine-off distance than is plausible given their fuel use (in a few cases more than the total distance). We leave those records out of every engine-off figure, including the 28% average across all models, and do not show an engine-off share for a model when less than half of its distance comes from consistent records. Fuel use per 100 km always uses all records.
  • Similar models on each model page and in comparisons are chosen within the same broad market segment (mainstream, premium, luxury or high-performance, assigned by us from make and model name) and within 15% of kerb weight, preferring other makes.
  • We only publish models with at least 200 cars. Models with fewer than 1,000 cars are marked as indicative.

Limits

The data shows how owners actually use these cars; your figure depends on how often you charge and how far you drive. Readings are lifetime totals, so cars that have only recently been registered carry less weight. The official figure is an approximation from CO2 and may differ slightly from the brochure value. Photos on the site are illustrative.

Licence and attribution

Source data: European Environment Agency, Real-world CO2 emissions from new cars and vans, reporting year 2024, doi:10.2909/ad652e2b-c4a1-4344-a536-dee5a9fae52d, licensed under CC BY 4.0. PluginRisk's aggregated table is available as a CSV download under the same licence. PluginRisk is independent and not affiliated with the EEA or any car maker.

Contact

Spotted an error or a model grouped wrongly? Email info@pluginrisk.com. We read every message about the data but cannot promise to reply to each one.