The other is that it's a plug-in hybrid but that doesn't mean much unless you actually plug it in. A lot of people are presumably buying them without installing a charging port and then just running them on gas all the time. But that's not the car's fault. You make your choices and then the money comes out of your own wallet.

These are the hybrid cars that are getting built, and this is the way people drive them. Yes the cars could theoretically be made different, but they arent today and they wont be in future. Yes people could theoretically use them differently, but they aren’t today and they wont.

The data is in. They are a bad solution for real people in the real world today. Saying “oh if they were just built different and people used them differently “ is … not a good argument. Let’s wait and see whether those two things change before EVs completely obsolete them in few short years.

Both types are being built. You can buy whichever one you want.

> this is the way people drive them

This is the way people from some sample at a particular time and place drive them. If you buy one you can drive it however you want, so what other people do isn't particularly relevant.

Moreover, they're presumably running them on gas because there wasn't convenient charging infrastructure available to them, but that's the same problem EVs have so if you change that then you also change the proportion of the time that plugin-in hybrids run on electricity.

As an obvious example, if a place has high electricity prices, like say central Europe after Germany shut down all their nuclear power plants and stopped being able to buy Russian natural gas, then people with a car that can run on either gasoline or electricity are going to more often choose the former because the latter is more expensive. But "real world data" from the time and place where that's happening is irrelevant to some other place or time where the cost of electricity is lower.

And that's just one factor.