Hybrid technology is a bridge towards pure electric.
Electric engines are much more simple and cheaper than combustion engines, only batteries are very expensive, but battery price is decreasing and in the future the production cost of an electric car will be lower than combustion and hybrid cars (hybrid means combustion+electric=the most expensive), this means that producers have already decided to go for electric because is convenient, because emission regulations will be impossible to respect with combustion technology and because users are demanding cheaper fuel vehicles.
Hybrid vehicles are produced to test the market and the technology (ie many smart electric drive have failures on the "electric" side, but the car can still go with the combustion engine), indeed the first toyota prius was expensive and ugly just to be not a best seller because the high production cost couldn't allow decent gain on sells, but market request surprisingly was much more that production capability that was a signal for how much is strong the market request for low consumption / cheap fuel vehicles.

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I think there'll be a tug of war between regulators and car manufactures. We're in a time crunch, and governments can't ignore that they need to reduce Co2 levels fast, if they don't want an environmental crisis on their hands.

Plugin Hybrids are a necessary transition technology to full electric, in my opinion. And, as such, it will be very important. Not as a zero emission technology, but as a transitory technology to zero emission (full electric).

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