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When Hybrids Do (And Don't) Make Sense
prostoalex writes "Recently NPR, CNN Money and Wall Street Journal Online have all dedicated some time and space to discussing hybrid vehicle pros and cons. It seems that hybrids do not make much financial sense if (a) you're buying after getting yourself into a debt with not really good interest on a car loan, (b) your battery requires replacement after being out of warranty, (c) your daily commute is not too long, so the price markup you pay for a hybrid does not translate into long-term gas savings." From the CNN article: "They may make a social statement you're interested in, but if you want to save money because of rising gas prices, you're heading down the wrong road, at least for now."
The main advantages of owning a hybrid now are that early adopters will drive the market to create a demand for innovation in the marketplace. The NPR discussion did point this out, but failed to hilight (at least some of) the reasons I have noted above, though I must admit I was too busy pay attention to the road on my *really long* commute to be sure that I didn't miss some of the speakers' points.
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
What would be the right 'road' to go down? (assuming that because of job or where you live cutting out driving altogether is unrealistic).
Several people have been charging their hybrid's batteries overnight from the AC mains, and for a situation where the commuting distance is short, this makes plenty of sense. You may never even have to start the engine, which will still of course be available for longer trips.
http://www.kfor.com/Global/story.asp?s=3390503
/. but didn't get around to it.
Was reading about how this guy gets 120MPG. Was going to submit it to
Is the cost of a hybrid versus other ideas worth it? Anyone look into this freezing method?
There are so many other cheaper vehicles, that get better gas mileage (and therefore contribute less to environmental destruction via oil exploration and refining) and that don't have huge, toxic battery packs that will be environmentally destructive in the event of a crash or when the car is scrapped (or merely the batteries require replacement). Honda and Toyota both offer several conventionally powered PZEV vehicles (the same standard to which the Prius conforms).
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
City buses cause more pollution per rider than almost any vehicle.
After you factor average riders per bus day, mileage per rider, and the cost of maintenance, the average short bus trip is over $10 (in Chicago) per rider. Some say $18 per trip. Just divide the yearly operating budget by yearly riders and you see a frightening figure.
Sure, one rider may not utilize a lot of gas, but the bureaucracy supporting our CTA is enormous. And all those city employees? Many drive cars.
My first car was a 1993 Honda Civic CX (Hatchback). Driving it modestly netted me ~60mpg.
I paid $12,000 (Canadian).
Today to find a car that get that kind of mileage will cost me $25k-$30k.
WTF is going on? Are economy cars the "next-big-price-gouge"?
Why are not all Standard cars getting 40+mpg?
We have more platics in our cars then we did 12 years ago. We have smarter computers that manage fuel consumption better.
If my company didn't require a car for my job, I would cycle to work everyday.
To recline is devine.
I love my recumbent!
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Hybrids would make sense for couriers and letter carriers most of all. All day driving, usually stop and go.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
It all depends on the problem you're trying to solve. For maximum gas mileage, get a bicycle. For good mileage, take the bus. If, however, you need a vehicle that can take the Boy Scouts camping or skiing on weekends and still get reasonable gas mileage for a daily commute in the city, a Ford Escape Hybrid can make sense. If you're looking for a sedan-like vehicle that produces geographically dispersed pollution, a plug-in variant of a Toyota Prius can make sense. If you own your vehicles for ten years (to amortize the purchase delta), you can help reduce the amount of oil imported or drilled with a hybrid while driving (sorry) the demand for more efficient vehicles. If you're rich, you can indulge yourself. Or maybe all you want is a car with the cute hybrid logo on the back to impress the chicks. We all make choices. Be wise.
You can help the enviroment far more with the same money. For example, for around $75 a year, several companies will buy pollution credits on your behalf, negating the emissions by your regular vehicle. In most states, the same amount of money can also be used to have your electricity come from "green" sources. Therefore, if you had two cars and a home, you could negate ALL of your primary emissions for about $225/year, which is far less than the cost of owning a hybrid.
Hybrids, at this point in time, are nothing but a wasteful political statement. There is almost no circumstance where they are socially beneficial, nor beneficial to the owner in any other respect than his or her ability to feel righteous.
Yup. I wish someone would make a hybrid diesel that focused tightly on aerodynamics and other efficiency factors. I drive about 50 miles per day, averaging 70mph. I'm running biodiesel in a New Beetle TDI, getting > 40 miles per gallon. Lately the biodiesel is cheaper than regular diesel (since its cost has stayed about the same over the last couple years), and it's better for the environment than regular diesel.
e lingsites/
To find biodiesel locations near you:
http://www.biodiesel.org/buyingbiodiesel/retailfu
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...telling me a product isn't for me. People telling me why I shouldn't buy an iPod nano (you can't store all your music on it, a mini is better...) or a GBA Micro (It's too small, it doesn't play games you can't play on another console, it's too expensive...) and now hybrids. The fact is, there are billions of people in this world and they all live in different niches with different needs, economic constraints and tastes. For any of these products there are probably thousands or millions of people whose needs are satisfied by them. The same is true of /. comments. They are often of the form "this product is of no use" rather than "it doesn't satisfy my particular requirements".
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
It is a myth that switching to electricity would cause more pollution due to the nature of how the electricity is generated. Even taking into account that the energy comes from coal and the losses due to transmission, electric cars are still more fuel efficient (and thus cheaper and cleaner) than gasoline powered cars.
Busses in the Sacramento Metro area burn CNG. Basically a modified diesel design, low maintenance, ultra low emission fuel. Still, they could improve (I think) as it would take me 40-60 minutes to get to my job via bus, or 10-15 min by private vehicle. until the delta between the two gets smaller I'll drive my beater that gets just over 10mpg. Thanks.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Obviously running the engine a lot in stop and go traffic affects the gas mileage a bit in that car, but the lowest my weekly average has ever been is 45mpg (combined city/highway, my drive to work is about 50% of each). That's still better than the best my old Contour ever got under the best circumstances (37mpg).
The worst I got in my Prius was 28MPG. That tank included a 12 hour shift being used as an emergency generator for the house during an Ice storm. It ran lights, a fridge, a freezer, the fireplace fan, and the TV.
If I just drove places, I would have gotten better mileage. The best mod for a Prius is an inverter.
To get that mileage, I turned off the heater because there was no need to defrost the windows or heat the car. Why burn the gas? In that generator mode, it would start up every 20 minutes for so and run for 3 or 4 minutes and shut down again.
The truth shall set you free!
That's Dino-Diesel. Check out Bio-Diesel. It's much cleaner then Diesel but not well supported by the Oil Industry.
All freight locomotives and many passenger locomotives are diesel-electrics. A diesel engine spins a generator that generates power for electric motors, and those motors alone drive the vehicle. So there's already a huge diesel-electric market in the U.S.
The actual reason there are few diesels in the U.S. is due to our strict environmental controls; they are lax for trucks but strict for cars, so there were no diesel cars here for a long time until VW's new TDi.
The reason there are no diesel-electric hybrids is because all the hybrids are being created by Japanese manufacturers, and they create gasoline cars. German manufacturers like diesel, and indeed they are creating many diesel cars, and there are even plans for some of them to create diesel-electric hybrids, though they're still largely reluctant to embrace hybrids. They seem to view hybrids as Japanese and diesel as European, which is stupid -- both are good technologies.
~CGameProgrammer( );
>I don't think the battery is supposed to last 10 years.
Toyota's currently saying "life of the car", whatever they mean by that. They're confident enough to warranty the Prius battery for 8 years or 100,000 miles.
Until there are 10-year-old Priuses we'll have to make do with lab tests and high-cycle cars. Toyota claims to have put batteries through a simulated 150,000 miles on the bench with only minor performance loss. More realistically, Yellow Cab in Vancouver BC put a Prius into taxi service (if you didn't know, generally the worst thing you can do to a car) and racked up 200,000 miles on the factory drivetrain before Toyota bought it back for study.
Your eyebrows *should* be going up. The NiMH batteries in our toys seldom get past a few hundred cycles or a few years. The difference seems to be fanatically conservative charge control by the car's software.
I recently spent 3+ years in Hybred research. Here generally are the facts.
Hybreds fit well with two use conditions. (1)Extremely regular stop and go like some city commutes and like a route driver for UPS or similar. (2)Extremely regular high speed long duration driving. The rest of the conditions they sink fast. Essentially the problems arise because batteries are maxed at about 9% thermal efficiency. The hybrid functions well where the engine power curves may be maximized against what would otherwise be a questionable driving use of the energy. The high speed driving is because the engine is at a low power setting in that condition. It is better to turn it on and off and set the generation engine at high power settings. The route driver is advantaged because the engine may be turned off automatically and on by demand with the power set to the high setting at the peak of the power curve.
If I haven't confused you yet, batteries suck. That is an understatement. There are several media that are better than the batteries we use in such vehicles but they have yet to be applied. My best advice on the whole issue is that generally Hybreds are good test beds for other technology. In most uses they are impractical devices as now presented. It should be noted that most modern trains and mine vehicles are hybreds. These are in use the precise cases I noted above. (Route drivers and long distance runners) My advice would be to wait for the fuel reformer/fuel cell technology it has the best of all worlds. It fits all conditions, operates at the top of the efficiency curve in all use conditions, can be scaled and is durable. Best of all this oncoming tech is almost here.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
I have found my hybrid's mileage to be in line with what the sticker said. The mileage does vary a lot depending on driving conditions--as with any car. I can get 87mpg on the highway in good weather whereas a short city trip in winter might only get 45mpg. Overall, the rated mileage numbers seem reasonable in my experience.
I suspect that the people disappointed with their mileage have mostly their driving habits to blame. People who accelerate to red lights or drive 90mph will get worse than the rated mileage, hybrid or not.
As a Toyota Prius hybrid owner, I did the math before buying. Turned out that gas would have to be $5.50/gal for over 4 years before I would turn a profit compared to a regular car with the same features (not including the current tax break).
BUT, I was a pharma rep for a couple years and I thought it would be a great statement to try and 'undo' some of the pollution I caused in that worthless job, driving around all day (approx 1000 miles/wk).
Then there is the geek factor. The car is geek. So deliciously geek. It can run completely quietly, which I refer to as "Ninja Mode" or "Stealth Mode". Everyone that has a Prius has a Ninja Mode story. Usually involving old ladies not paying attention in parking lots. Another nice thing is that I don't have to fill it up much. Actually, right now, I fill it up around once every 4 weeks.
And there's nothing more fun than pulling into a gas station, realizing that the guy next to you in the Hummer is about to hit $60 worth of gas, dropping only $2 on gas into the car, and driving off as it you've got a full tank. (of course, gas up down the road)
Tall, wide tires. Cars are much bigger. Engines are much more powerful. And cars have many more safety features on there. Safety features add weight.
And just so you know, plastic weighs more than metal much of the time. For example, the plastic panels on Saturns add significant weight. Basically plastic just isn't as strong under much except impact, so it adds a lot of weight when you make it thick enough to have the characteristics you need.
Think of it this way, look at a race car. Weight matters a lot on race cars. Do race cars have a lot of plastic on them? Even in places where strength doesn't matter (like inside), metal is used in preference to plastic, fiberglass in preference to metal and carbon fiber in preference to fiberglass.
And for those who are skeptical about the 60mpg, Canadian gallons are 25% larger than American ones. So that's 48mpg US, not odd for that car. The Geo Metro XFi got 55mpg US (highway), or 69mpg Imperial (Canadian).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Actually, the Japanese make wonderful diesels.
On a recent trip to Germany, I had the chance to drive a Mazda 6 with a turbo-diesel. A trip from Hamburg to Stuttgart averaged an equivalent 38 MPG at speeds between 130 km/h and 170 km/hr (roughly 80 - 105mph). The car was quiet and the only time you really knew it was a diesel was at idle (and just barely).
It's beyond me why the US can't look past the GM diesel of the 80's and take a serious look at the new diesel technology.
As a country, we could make a substantial reduction in the amount of fuel we waste with large, gasoline powered vehicles by simply switching to diesel as Europe has done (60%+ of new vehicles in Germany are diesel-powered).
It would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name
When calculating the environmental impact of a Prius, don't forget to include the fact that new cars use oil and power before the first time that they're even fired up. It takes gas to get the factory workers to work, to power the machinery it takes electric which is usually coal, it takes energy to get the designers' computers to work, it takes energy to get the designers to work...blah blah blah A used car has already made that impact, a new car is basically buying a NEW environmental disaster.