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Hybrid/Electric Vehicles: Should I Buy?
nissin writes "I'm ready to buy my first vehicle, and would like to hear your experiences with either hybrid or electric vehicles. Are they a good alternative to conventional vehicles, or just a geek toy? Do they perform well in the city? How about on long road trips? I am also interested in hearing about other alternative, yet practical, forms of transportation that I may have missed."
Being more maneuverable and closer to the ground, compact cars are generally safer for people inside _and_ outside the car.
People who believe that SPUTES are safer really need to get a grip on reality.
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I just puchased a '87 Subaru 4wd wagon for $1400 for most of the reasons you just mentioned:
1. Montana winters
2. Room for passangers
3. Room for cargo
4. Doing my part to NOT FUND OIL WARS
What I really hate about all of the "super trucks" is trying to see past them at intersections.
SUVS: Safer for the owners, more dangerous for everyone else on the road.
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Crippling??? Puh-lease... I get so sick of hearing people complain about the price of gas. Over the labor day weekend, one of the generic TV anchors here in Indy made a comment like, "yeah, with prices this high I'm staying home this weekend."
I'm sorry, but the price of gas has very little to do with the total cost of going on a trip. Let's say you've got a car that gets 20 mpg, and you want to head to the beach for the weekend (say, 800 mile round trip). You're looking at 40 gallons of gas, so if the price jumped 50 cents a gallon, you're out a whopping $20. Will that make or break your vacation plans? Hardly.
For all the moaning and groaning, the bottom line is that people's habits haven't really changed much. Look at fuel economy standards, which haven't really gone anywhere in the last 15 years. I say, creep up the gas tax until habits change and people actually start focusing on fuel economy. There are plenty of good things that money could go towards (reducing budget deficits, improving & investing in civil infrastructure, etc.).
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How's that again? You must have taken a very different econ class from any I ever did.
The "supply" of oil is a function of the price. Higher prices mean more oil becomes economically recoverable. If the demand for oil drops, the oil that is cheapest to pump gets pumped. The rest sits in the ground.
Of course, the problem is that the cheapest oil to pump isn't governed by free market forces, it is price controlled (OPEC), so requiring less isn't necessarily going to mean much downward pressure on the price, but it certainly won't cause the price to go up.
Maybe you are thinking of economies of scale, but oil production is so far beyond the point where that is changing.
"Petrol" is two letters shorter than "gasoline" and is less ambiguous than "gas".
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Got the same car. Love it. Not too long ago I read some article (in Ars Technica) about how driving the HCH changes the way you drive. It's absolutely true. I'm from a country where people drive with intent to kill. Stop signs are taken as suggestions. Always drove fast, recklessly and (my wife would argue) stupidly. I was brought up that way, sorry. Anyway, since I got the HCH my only goal while driving is to maximize the mileage. This model comes with an instantaneous mileage reading and a cumulative one. So now I rarely go over 68 mph. I'm getting 57~58 mpg on the road, and around 48 in the city (I have the manual shift one - another cultural hangup). There's just one thing that I started doing that is definitely moronic. I tend to lock on big semis and tailgate them to improve the mileage even more. Feel like Lance Armstrong. Except he's not retarded, I think. Anyway the technology on these guys is pretty awesome. You get to a stop sign, and the engine stops. Start rolling again and the engine starts as you press the accelerator. A thing of beauty. Plus it's really quiet, and if you choose to ignore it, you would never know that you are not driving just a regular Civic. Finally, you get an obnoxious smug feeling when the idiots on the SUV zoom by you. (Though you could hit 100 mph if you were not so compulsively trying to break the barrier of 60 mpg).
"The dash gauges are a pretty informative mix of what's going on. It has a instant mpg bar that goes up n down as you drive, as well as displaying the overall mpg for a trip mileage. (2 of these). One I have on total vehicle mileage so I can see what I'm getting as I continue driving. The other I use for various trips to see what different types of driving produce fuel economy wise."
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My parent's 1988 Ford Aerostar had all that. My dad's 95 VW Jetta had that, as does my brother's 2000 Jetta. I'm sort of amused that most people haven't had this kind of thing for years.
I think you missed a key point - he's not talking about mileage, he's talking about a REALTIME miles-per-gallon display. That is the instantaneous mpg your vehicle is traveling at a moment in time. I have a 2000 Jetta with every option, and unless he added it afterwards, your brother does NOT have this option.
On a different note on this feature, the only cars I've seen with a real-time mpg display before the hybrids started coming out was all the BMWs (that I've driven) for the last decade or so. It is a very handy feature that I think more cars SHOULD have. It's amazing to see how little changing your highway speed in a BMW M3, for example, makes the different between a constant 20mpg on the highway and between a constant 25-30mpg.
It's also very amusing to watch your realtime mpg when you're jaunting around a racetrack. If you want to see how hard you're really driving the car, it's alot more telling to watch the mpg instead of the speedometer or even the tach. I still get a thrill everytime I blip the throttle to downshift to third at turn 11 at Thunderhill and watch the mpg dial spike from 20 to almost zero in an instant.
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I would disagree. A hybrid car can save money in some other ways too:
I for one think a good start to the SUV problem is regulation. Hear me out:
Now the upshot of the truck/passenger vehicle classification dualism is that SUV's are exempt from having to meet milage and emissions standards for passenger vehicles. Therefore most SUVs have more horsepower for a comparable displacement. Yet since they're licensed as a passenger vehicle, the SUV gets cheap car plates and registration. This simply must stop! Either it's a car, or it's a truck. They can't have it both ways.
Secondly and perhaps more controversially, I believe that a new license class should be created for large SUVs. There are simply too many people unqualified to handle a 7000+ pound vehicle treating these things like big sports car! When I wanted to ride a motorcycle, I had to get a special certification on my license, and so should it be for large SUVs.