The badges have blurred. A vehicle can be called electrified and mean almost anything, so it helps to sort them by one question: does it need plugging in, and can it run without petrol.

Hybrid, sometimes called a self-charging hybrid

A petrol engine plus a small battery and electric motor. You never plug it in. The battery charges itself from the engine and from braking, and it runs the car at low speeds and helps out the engine the rest of the time.

You fill it with petrol exactly like any other car. The benefit is better fuel economy, and it is most noticeable in stop-and-go traffic, which is where a conventional engine is at its worst.

Good fit if you do a lot of city driving and do not want to think about charging at all.

Plug-in hybrid, or PHEV

A bigger battery than a hybrid, an electric range of roughly a few dozen kilometres, and a petrol engine that takes over when the battery runs down. You can plug it in, and you should.

The idea is that short daily trips run on electricity and long trips run on petrol, with no range anxiety because the engine is still there.

The catch is real and worth knowing. A PHEV that never gets plugged in is just a heavy hybrid with worse economy than a proper hybrid, because you are carrying the battery weight without using it. The savings depend entirely on charging it.

Good fit if your daily driving is short, you can charge at home, and you still want to drive to the Interior on a long weekend without planning anything.

Battery electric, or BEV

No engine, no petrol, no oil changes, no exhaust. A large battery and one or more electric motors, and it only moves if you have charged it.

Running costs are the lowest of the four if you charge at home, and maintenance is genuinely lighter because there is much less to service. Public fast charging costs considerably more than charging at home, which is the detail that decides whether an EV saves you money.

Good fit if you can charge where you park overnight and you keep vehicles for a while.

Mild hybrid, sometimes badged MHEV

This one causes the most confusion, because it is barely a hybrid. A small electric system assists the engine and smooths out stop-start, but it cannot drive the car on its own.

Expect a modest fuel economy improvement and nothing more. It is worth knowing what you are looking at when a listing says hybrid and the price seems surprisingly reasonable.

The question that actually decides it

Where do you park at night, and can you plug in there.

If you can charge at home, a BEV or a PHEV both make sense and the choice comes down to how often you drive long distances. If you cannot charge at home, a conventional hybrid is usually the better answer than a plug-in you will never plug in, and a BEV becomes a much harder case because you would be relying on public charging.

Everything else, the badge, the tax treatment, the incentive of the month, sits downstream of that one question.

A note on buying used

On a used electrified vehicle, ask about the battery. What warranty is left on it, whether it has been replaced, and what the current usable capacity looks like against what it had new.

On a used PHEV specifically, ask whether the previous owner actually charged it. A PHEV that spent its life running on petrol has an engine with more wear than the odometer alone would suggest.