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The Math Behind the Hybrid Hype
markmcb writes "OmniNerd has posted a thorough mathematical analysis of purchasing a hybrid vehicle that dispels much of the hype associated with this modern buzz word. The author considers all of the major factors to show just how much money a hybrid vehicle will or won't save you. In the end, it seems the only real winner after a hybrid purchase is the environment."
Here in Europe the fuel prices are vastly different. Where in the US the price this year was between 37.9 and 26.82 UK pence / litre, in the UK it is currently 91 . So you would have to multiply the savings in petrol by 3 or so.
Fortunately in Europe we also have a system of public transport which most environment minded people (like myself) prefer to use rather than pretend we are doing our bit through the purchase of a new car.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
I bought my prius to replace my 15 year old celica. I didn't buy it to save money, I bought it because it was an interesting/cool car in my price range. The fact that it is a hybrid entered into MY purchase equation but it wasn't the only reason.
The fact that I've gotten as much as 66.5 mpg (after a 50 mile round trip commute) is just icing on the cake.
My dad works for a local government and was required to investigate the use of hybrid vehicles for use in his department, as a form of gasoline reduction measure, to save money. However, since this local government doesn't have to pay taxes on the gasoline it purchases, it can get it for very cheap. He also found that it would take well beyond the life of the vehicle to become profitable.
I think it's kind of unfortunate, really, why hybrids cost so much more than conventional vehicles. The tax incentives in this case were of no use, as I said, because this agency didn't pay taxes.
This data does not take into account someone who is already willing to lay out 20-30K on a SUV and deciding to switch to a hybrid instead. It has been long obvious that hybrids were not yet the most cost efficient way to travel. Though if you already own a 30K SUV, and you trade it in for a hybrid, you will see savings. Take these statistics for what they are. The most interesting point being in figure 13 where it seems with gas at 2.50 a gallon, a car that gets 50 - 60 mpg would have to cost less than 13,000 to be the cheapest new bought transportation.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
Fundamentally, there is a problem with the way the US is underpricing fuel. In Europe prices are much higher (US$6 per gallon is typical) which provides a financial incentive to create cars with lower fuel consumption, primarily though making more efficient engines.
Until the US starts to tax gasoline products in order to encourage fuel efficiency, then the US will continue to drive around in inefficient gas guzzlers. Heck, they would in Europe too if the tax regime wasn't different.
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Fuel prices are protected in China and America, this has to be taken into account. So should the change in cost of running over time. In Western Austrlia we are debating desalinationplats versus pipelines. the major bonus in desalination plants is that as the technology gets better the costs get cheaper. The artcle fails to deduce the drop in cost and increase in productivity caused by new fuel production and use technologies. And etcetera...
Except you could help the environment a lot more by spending the money on pollution credits, so it really isn't a great decision on that front either.
Anyone who purchases a hybrid without doing at least a really basic cost analysis is an idiot.
We purchased a Prius back in June. We knew that unless gas stays at like $3 or $4 a gallon, it wouldn't really pay off (and then Katrina hits, and we actually paid $3 a gallon for a few weeks).
It's not a cheap car, but fully loaded, it really wasn't that big a difference for us compared to, say, and Accord. And it gets better mileage. You can run the A/C in stop-and-go traffic with virtually no gas consumption (the gas engine cycles on for 30 seconds every five minutes or so).
Plus, it's incredibly geeky. What's not to love? We've even been able to fit a lot of stuff in it for weekend trips (suitcase, assorted other bags, cameras, etc., plus a stroller, pack-and-play, and, of course, the baby), even leaving the back seat pretty much free of extra boxes or bags. You'd never think there was so much space to look at it from the outside.
Bottom line: Don't buy it to save money. Buy it for the clean air impact, and especially to support the longer-term development of hybrid technology. Imagine if this were in *every* Toyota car -- their CAFE numbers would probably be up in the 30s or 40s (it's probably in the 20s right now).
[it's also displaced our Explorer as our primary errand-running car, which is certaily helping *our* bottom line somewhat...]
Why must hybrids be the only product to prove themselves economically? If people bought stuff based solely on price/performance, we'd all be only eating bread, drinking water, living in small shacks, and driving white 15-year old Honda Civics. Boring.
I buy lots of things that don't make economic sense. I have expensive sports equipment like road bikes and scuba gear. My computer has lots of fast parts that I don't really "need".
Maybe there's more to things than just what your ROI is.
if you're the type of person that gets a new car every 5-7 years or 100,000 miles, whichever comes first, then no, you're not going to save money by purchasing a more expensive car. If, on the other hand, you're the type who takes care of your vehicle, maintains it, maybe even makes a few repairs on your own rather than taking it to the shop (or neglecting problems outright), with the hopes of getting 10-20 years (and 250,000+ miles) out of your vehicle, then you might actually save money in the long run, assuming roughly equal wear-and-tear and part replacement needs for hybrid and conventional vehicles.
My personal take on it is that hybrid and fuel-cell systems are still flawed due to their continued reliance on fossil fuels. An all-electric vehicle would be ideal, and indeed we have our electric motor science down pat. What we lack are effective battery systems -- pound for pound, gasoline contains far more energy than our best batteries. Until we can improve our electrical energy storage, we are limited to either having a very small "gas tank", in which we'd have to stop and recharge every 50 miles or so, or a very large, heavy, slow vehicle carrying a ton or six of battery cells in order to extend the range of the vehicle. Neither is a generally viable solution.
The car manufacturers are reluctant to further research these alternate systems, I think, due to the fact that if you take away or reduce the internal combustion components of an engine, you reduce the stress and heat experienced by the engine, which means the engine parts fail less often, which means they sell fewer new cars. No company is going to deliberately research ways to reduce their profit.
the only real winner after a hybrid purchase is the environment.
Oddly, this particular analysis is only looking the economic factor, which anybody who's ever priced out a hyrbrid knows that owning a gasoline car is still cheaper.
It would be interesting to see a similar paper on Total Environmental Impact.
Gas-only cars burn more gasoline, which means not only more pollution from the car's exhaust, but also more demand for oil refineries.
A hybrid car requires less gas, but it also has a massive battery which will need to be disposed of safely in a few years. What would it be like to manage the disposal of these batteries if there was suddenly tens of millions of such cars driving around?
I'm sure things would still favor the hybrid by a pretty good margin, in spite of issues like this, but it would be interesting to see a complete comparison. (One that is not from somebody trying to sell us on the idea of owning a hybrid.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Actually, the analysis is based on MSRP, but I doubt anyone pays MSRP anymore. In fact, I've two Honda civics, one standard (for my wife), and one hybrid. The hybrid came with more options standard and ultimately I argued the price down to about $1400 of the normal Civic. I've made that up between tax breaks and gas savings, but better still it's ULEV that can go 600 miles on a tank of gas. That's pretty good.
As far as maintenance costs -- both have been excellent.
I think it is fair to say that one of the big selling points for hyrbrids would be that you can save some money. People are hyper-aware of fuel prices right now. The idea is whatever helps move people to cleaner and more efficient transportation is a good thing. By touting "savings" you can get people on board who don't give a rat's rear end about the environment. As long as it works, do you really care if they don't have the proper attitude?
Or you can be like a lot of /.ers and tax gas until it's $8.00 a gallon, or just issue a decree that all the citizenry will be issued 2 Segways per family, and that's it...
Dark Reflection
That is to say, everyone and everything on the planet.
And the oil companies and the auto makers who get to wring some more life out of their outdated internal combustion technology.
Wikipedia's article on battery operated vehicles is pretty damn interesting. Why was that technology abandoned? There's no reason why with modern technology we couldn't build an all-electric car that had comparable performance to any hybrid (they already did in every category save range) and similar range (the missing piece). Who here wouldn't own a battery powered electric vehicle if it had about 300-350 miles of range?
In fact such a car would probably be cheaper (subtract the internal combustion engine, replace it with a nearly maintenance free electric motor(s), possibly subtract the transmission, subtract the cooling system, add batteries) and a lot easier to maintain -- brakes/wheel bearings/etc would be the only items left -- and the brake pads could last a lot longer with regenerative breaking.
I still think it doesn't happen because it would put too many people out of work in Detriot/Japan/Germany -- and to a lesser extent because of the oil influence. But that's just my paranoia. Wish I had the investors and the wherewithal to give it a shot on my own.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
What, you're going to drive to work in pollution credits?
Look at how much toxic chemicals is in a battery. Now factor in that you have to replace the batt every 2-4 years. Not only does it end up costing you more, but you're not doing much besides thinking you're helping.
Interesting...I've had my Prius for over 2-1/2 years and over 75,000 miles, and I haven't had to replace the battery yet. The battery carries a 100,000 mile warranty, and is designed for the life of the car.
Where does the 2-4 year number come from?
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
They only burn less because they usually have a higher utilisation. And they only always have higher utilisation during rush hours.
e.g.
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002197.html
Conventional mass transit isn't the answer. Packetised mass transit is...
Deleted
I'll second that.
Not only do VW TDIs get phenomenal fuel mileage, they also make power. Something hybrids do not do. Granted, I modded my TDI, but it's making 300 ft lbs of torque and still getting 45 MPG. If VW actually built an anemic TDI (that is, one that only made as much power as your average hybrid) I would bet it would double the fuel economy.
Diesel motors are more efficient by design. They have lower exhaust temps (less energy wasted through heat) and they don't have a throttle (when your foot is off of the throttle on a gas car, you've turned the motor into a vacuum pump - again, wasting energy).
That being said, why hasn't anyone built a diesel-electric hybrid car? Surely it would maximize power & economy?
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>A hybrid car requires less gas, but it also has a massive >battery which will need to be disposed of safely in a few years.
P riusFrames.htm
The prius battery is actually quite small- about the size of a small suitcase. It is composed of 280 D cells (actual consumer D cells were used in the initial Japanese models). In terms of energy, it holds about a HALF A CUP of gasoline. This is all that is needed to smooth out the peaks and valleys of energy demand during stop and go driving, thus allowing a smaller (hence more efficient) gasoline engine.
>What would it be like to manage the disposal of these batteries >if there was suddenly tens of millions of such cars driving >around?
Recycling. The nickel in the NiMH batteries is valuable enough that recycling pays for itself. They can be melted down and used again and again and again... The electrolite is plain old
potassium hydroxide; caustic but no more "hazardous" than bleach.
For an outstanding whitepaper on the prius drivetrain (including mathcad models), see:
http://home.earthlink.net/~graham1/MyToyotaPrius/
Toyota don't dispose of the batteries, they recycle them. They aren't throwing the heavy metals in a hole somewhere. (Another poster mentioned they pay a $200 bounty for bringing the battery for recycling as an incentive).
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This is a critical point. Without taking the resale value into account, the calculations are useful only in determining what your monthly payment is-- not what your lifetime cost for the car is.
By my math, if I'd bought a Prius instead of a Civic HX in 2001, I would just now be crossing the point where I was ahead. I would not, however, have that money in hand unless I sold the car. I would have paid out more per month, but I would also get more back on selling.
On the other hand, it's almost never a winning financial bet to buy a hybrid when you already have a working car. New vs. new, a hybrid will just barely edge out a similar but cheaper car over five years or so, but it would have to be a staggering difference in fuel economy to beat out a paid-for car.
I suspect time and availability of recharging are factors.
They are factors but not insurmountable ones. For 95% of your activity simply recharging your BEV overnight would be good enough. Think about it -- you go to work (30 miles in my case -- that's probably average for the US), work all day, then you go home. Even if you go out and party until last call your car still has several hours to be recharged before you go back to work.
Also, where can you plug in to recharge? In an apartment without reserved parking, you can't guarantee being able to get to a plug. I can imagine most landlords having a problem with long extension cords running across the parking lot.
And that should stop Detroit/et all from investing in this technology? Those are hardly insurmountable problems. It's not a big leap of faith to picture "BEV friendly" apartment complexes or worksites.
If a gasoline-powered car runs out of gas, the driver can hitch a ride to a station and back with a couple of gallons. What do you do when if/when your batteries run out? Getting towed is expensive.
Well there's no reason to run out of gasoline or battery power other then stupidity on the part of the owner. I've never run out of gas.
My whole point is that this technology should not have been abandoned. Why isn't it still being researched? What about that new battery chemistry that we read about awhile ago that recharges to 90% in only a few minutes? Could that scale into BEV sizes? Why the hell isn't nobody researching and building these things? I would buy one -- so would a lot of other people.
Hell, if Detroit would invest half the money into BEV technology that they spend on marketing for the H2 and Grand Cherokee.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
With the Prius, a 40 mile per hour highway commute would be ideal for achieving good mileage. It's not simply a case of the electric motor being used when going slow and gas engine being used when going faster, it's a case of both motors being used together as required. Also, because the gas engine is not being used at low acceleration, the it's RPM is kept in its most efficient range. The EPA's Prius city/highway ratings (higher in the city/lower on the highway) are not accurate for most drivers. Most of us get significantly higher on the freeway.
And this is a key point that the author overlooked in the economic analysis. It's similar to saying the world's space programs have all been a total economic waste and reaching that conclusion by eliminating all of the economic side effects that have resulted from the technology that went into those space programs. That's a political statement, not an analysis.
The large-scale production of NiMh battery arrays that go into hybrids is rapidly reducing the unit price of these high energy density storage devices. Now, is it really a great lap of logic to think that low-cost high energy density rechargeable electricity packs might find use in other products besides hybrid vehicles once the price is right?
Not only has the price of large arrays of NiMh cells gone down dramatically in a short time, but the early stages of an upramp in large arrays of Li-Ion batteries is beginning as well.
But wait, there's more!
Supercapacitors. Did you know that the regenerative braking system in Japanese hybrids uses arrays of supercapacitors? Again, the technology has been around for a long time, the real issue is price and the price doesn't come down until we get economies of scale and we don't get economies of scale until we get a consumer grade product that uses masses of these devices.
The availability of these high energy density devices at low prices is almost guaranteed to have fall-over effects in all sorts of different consumer markets. Unless you take those significant advantages into consideration, it's really just a snipe to draw a conclusion about the lack of economic value in a hybrid car.
If you think Toyota is 'paying' you to bring in dead battery packs, you may be delusional...since they will then charge $2,000-$3,000 (or more) to replace them in your vehicle. No, they'll buy them from owners of Priuses that have been totaled. In that case the owners certainly aren't looking to replace them.
Well, there's a good an bad side. I think it's safe to say that capitalism tends to break down when it comes to utilities. This is because the vendor has no market to GAIN, only to LOSE, and so market share loss is all important, and that drives companies to try to lock people in with no interest in how much it disenfranchises them. Because of this strain on the capitalist system, utilities tend to be regulated... all except for gasoline, for some strange reason.
So, I can approve of moving from total reliance on gasoline to a partial reliance, but we're replacing it with a reliance on electricity, which is still generated primarily by the burning of fossil fuels; loses a fair amount in transmission (far more waste than shipping gasoline, and you get to use all of the other parts of the crude oil when you ship gasoline for things like plastics, heating oil, lubricants, adhesives, etc.); and the filtration is not quite as efficient, though it's MUCH better than it was 20 years ago. Also on the plus side, however: you CAN use trash burning (one of the most environmentally friendly operations going in the modern facilities) to generate electricity; you can also use nuclear power, which concentrates your waste problem into a much more managable space which would be easy to deal with if we didn't have a "not in my back yard" mentality in the U.S.
The ideal solution is what Brazil is doing. Make alcohol out of sugars (for which you need heat, so it's not a waste-free process -- they use beets as the starter), and then burn the alcohol in cars that can take a mix or alcohol and gas in any ratio. Alcohol isn't toxin-free, but you still have significant controls on car exhaust, but it's far cheaper so people can actually afford even stricter regulations on filtration.
One thing I don't see in the article is discussion of the impact of braking. Regenerative breaking is a huge win, but really only helps in city driving, and even then requires skill on the part of the driver. It's a huge win, but not one which is easy to quantify. I'd love to see a study which tracked a couple of groups: one that was told just to drive around the city for a day and one that was given a class on how to use the breaks and then told to drive around the city. I wonder what the real-world delta on fuel efficiency would be.
I believe that the time is ripe to publish my own findings on this subject.
My research was specific, so my results are too. The bottom line is that if you purchase a Honda Civic Hybrid you save $5,638.32 and 30 hours of your life in comparison with the purchase of a Honda Civic GX.
I've factored in things that most people don't consider, such as:
Oil changes are slightly more expensive for the hybrid Civic, because synthetic oil should be used. However, oil changes are required every 10,000 miles, unlike the 5,000 of the Civic GX.
At least through the end of this year, in California, purchase of an HEV will get you a $2,000 tax writeoff - which boils down to approximately $600 in actual money.
While the initial cost of owning a Civic Hybrid are higher than a Civic GX; the cost OVER TIME is lower, and my calculations take that into account. In order to save money with a hybrid, you'll have to be in it for the long haul, to the tune of about 80,000 miles. At 80,000, you start saving money over a Civic GX.
The battery replacement issue: Yes, this is the big deal that the oil company shills like to bring up every chance they get, but it's really a non-issue. $2,000 to replace the batteries still leaves you with over $5,000 saved. And, I have in my posession (see the link) maintenance records of a Civic Hybrid logging 129,000 miles and never having an HEV battery replaced.
Miles per gallon: It's common knowlege that the EPA mileage on a Civic Hybrid is a bit on the optimistic side. That's why I took my MPG data from actual Hybrid drivers. Note that my numbers are for people who KNOW HOW TO DRIVE A HYBRID - they won't work for your 16 year old son who's trying to drag race the thing at every green light. (and on a related tangent, Hybrids have great torque because acceleration from a stop is heavily assisted by the electric motor - so in a short race, your hybrid might beat a regular Civic. Don't put any money on it, though... I'm not a racer, so I'm not sure)
The good news here (if you can call it good) is that the higher that gas prices go, the wider a gap there is between hybrids and the "normal" kind of car, (whatever we'd call it in this context).
Please let me know if I've made any mistakes in my reasoning - I don't want to fool myself any more than I want to fool the rest of you - so if I've made a mistake (and I often do), I certainly want to be put straight about it. The beautiful thing about this spreadsheet is that you can easily put in numbers that match your situation and see updated totals. Is the price of gas higher or lower where you live? Change it!
http://sonic.net/~montag/hybrid/
I wish I'd had more time to format my results nicer - maybe add some charts or something. But the OpenOffice Spreadsheet which I'm linking you to was really created for my own personal use. I hope it's useful to somebody!
You can run but you can't hide, except, apparently, along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
Papers like these are crowning examples of why economics is not just imperfect, but a fundamentally flawed "science". Cost and pricing, according to economic theory, are supposed to represent actual real-world values of labor and resources consumed to produce something. The fact that economics cannot properly account, even remotely, the degradation of the environment and account for how this will impact us in ten to 100 years means that its recommendations should be taken within a strictly constrainted box.
However, economics has become the modern religion of politics, with its "experts" word taken as golden writ, despite the path of ruination it leads us to. The world continues to ramp up nonsustainable consumption of all resources, especially as China, India, and other countries modernize. The only route to redefining the costs and economic behaviors is government regulation, which is now so passe and under steady assault, both explicitly through increased conservatism, and practically by offshoring all manufacturing in unregulated countries.
Of course Slashdot happily plops shit like this paper on slashdot as the holy scree of the economists, as if that is the end all be all. W00t! Hybrid owners p0wn'd, we're l33t kewl.
please.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
Well, there's a good an bad side. I think it's safe to say that capitalism tends to break down when it comes to utilities. This is because the vendor has no market to GAIN, only to LOSE, and so market share loss is all important, and that drives companies to try to lock people in with no interest in how much it disenfranchises them. Because of this strain on the capitalist system, utilities tend to be regulated... all except for gasoline, for some strange reason.
That's because gasoline is a commodity, not a utility. Anybody with a well can put crude on the market, and anybody with an operating refinery can purchase the crude and distill it, then sell the products which consist of everything from asphalt, heating oil, natural gas, to plastics. While we have organic equivalents to all of this, oil is just so cheap...
I tend to prefer the coop model for utilities, which generally consist of water, sewar, gas, electricity, telephone, and maybe cable. Roads in a sense as well. Those items where running a seperate network for compitition just isn't going to happen. Telephone and cable are starting to have competitors, as new technology allows them to compete with each other, and things like satellite and cell phones allow competitors to enter without having to run a network.
I don't read AC A human right
35-40MPG only applies on the Ford Escape HEV (disclaimer: I worked on the software for the Ford Escape HEV), where the basic Escape gets less than 20MPG. It's a big fuck-off SUV, which is the reason - you may have noticed some difference in body shape between an Escape and a VW Rabbit, maybe?
Prius and Insight are small saloons, which are much more aerodynamic. They typically get 50-60MPG.
Running cars on hydrogen is easy. Storing enough hydrogen to get a decent range is hard. Generating hydrogen efficiently is harder. Similarly, pure-electric cars have been around for over 100 years, but no-one's yet found batteries that'll hold charge comparable to a full gas tank, or a recharging system as effective as a gas station. Partly the problem is lack of research, and a major reason for lack of research is a lack of "environazi" pressure on governments to wake up and smell the CO2/NO2/particulates/smog. Cost-wise and energy-density-wise, gasoline is a great solution, it just happens to have the problematic side-effect of screwing up the environment (both locally and globally).
Grab.
Now that I'm living elsewhere and have a longer drive to work, I've looked into alternatives to save fuel. There's no carpool/vanpool from my house to work and public transportation is out of the question (It's possible, but involves a 3 mile drive to train station, three trains, and 2 hours).
For now I'm stuck with my Honda Accord however at 33MPG I can't complain, even if gas was $3 a gallon again. I noticed that when gas prices were over $3 a gallon, most of the people complaining were drivers of SUVs and pickup trucks. I personally don't have a problem with gas being $3 or even $4 a gallon. The cheaper the better, but the net effect of higher gas prices would be lower consumption. I still miss the days when $10 would get me over 300 miles with my 89 Honda Civic!
Not quite. I've been drive an 05 Prius for about a month now, and watching what the power train is doing has made me as sensitive to hills as I am on a bicycle. At 60 on a downhill, the engine sometimes cuts off and the battery assist is sufficient to maintain speed.
Starting on level ground, the engine doesn't come on until I'm doing 15 (if nobody is behind me. If I'm in typical commuter traffic, it is polite to accelerate faster than the battery alone can). Starting on an uphill, the engine comes on immediately.
It is really a lot of fun to watch the engine & battery do their on & off dance. By the way, I get better mileage on highway driving. I get somewhere in the low 30 in neighborhood driving and somewhere around 60 on divided highways. 46 overall.
Yeah or you can run them on biodiesel or veggie oil... Veggie oil is the cleanest, but has maybe 10-12% less energy than a diesel fuel. Biodiesel has less of some emissions and more of others...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem with gas guzzlers in the US can be traced back to three things: GM, Chrysler, and Ford. Every time the subjects of efficiency standards and pollution come up, the big three automakers whine and say they'll lose money.
I used to live in New York State in the 60s and early 70s. Periodically, someone would start agitating about NYC seceding from the state and forming its own state. But it never happened. One reason it never happened is that NYC is a net money sink. More state money flows into NYC than flows out of it via state taxes. So in at least one case, the "rural" areas are subsidizing the urban areas, not vice versa.
> mouthful of broken teeth in the keyer's mouth
Yes, but violence can put you in gaol too. Keying SUVs now is far better than using nuclear weapons to knock out industrial polluters in 35 years time, when we are in survival mode.
I stole this
Hello, The post maybe on hybrid, but what would the effect be of a bio-diesel, ethanol, hydrogen, or myabe a bio-diesel battery combo?
>I modded my TDI, but it's making 300 ft lbs of torque
258 for an unmodified Prius, *at zero RPM*. Low end torque is where electric motors shine.
>(when your foot is off of the throttle on a gas car, you've turned the motor into a vacuum pump - again, wasting energy).
When your foot is off the throttle on a hybrid the engine stops (unless it needs to charge the battery, run the air conditioner or keep the catalytic converter warm).
>anemic TDI (that is, one that only made as much power as your average hybrid)
Take another look. Only five years ago there was the three-cylinder Insight and the domestic-model Prius which had just enough power to be in a Tokyo traffic jam. Today's models are plenty adequate for freeway onramps and contingency maneuvers. The current Prius does 0-60 in about 10.5 seconds, which is not high performance but not anemic either.
My research indicates otherwise.
http://sonic.net/~montag/hybrid
You can run but you can't hide, except, apparently, along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
I have owned a Prius since 2001 and most of what I like about it has nothing to do with the fuel economy. I like the fact that when you stop at a light the car doesn't make any noise or vibration. I like the fact that the continuously variable transmission doesn't clunk from one gear to the next. I like the fact that it seems to drive with very little effort or exertion on the drive train, I've put 60K miles on the car and it runs just as good as the day we picked it up, the gasoline engine has probably seen far less extreme running / wear as a comparable small gasoline vehicle. I enjoy the low end torque and lack of any acceleration delay.
If I had a choice between a 10K Toyota Echo and a 20k Prius I'd have chosen the Prius based on handling and drivability regardless.
I'm also a little mystified by all of the bashing of the mileage reports. I consistently get 50 miles/gallon highway and 45-48 city.
I haven't seen the report because the site is dead but I'm wondering how they are factoring in $3,4,5/gallon future gas prices.
I couldn't agree more. During the summer I break out my 89' Camaro because it makes me feel cool and it's fun to drive. It also gets 22mpg max. My girlfriend recently bought a Toyota Carolla that gets great gas milage, I still use less gas then she does.
Why>
I ride the bus.
I consolodate trips together.
I don't ride the gas
I avoid rush hour traffic whenever possible
Buying green is great if you have the money, acting green is a great start for everyone else.
Anecdotals, reported right here on slashdot, showed one very good use for hybrids. During the hurricane katrina immense long evacuation lines, MANY normal cars ran out of gas just sitting idling,creeping along, whereas the hybrids, shutting off completely at standstill, conserved their fuel and were able to make it out on the one and *only* tank of gas they could get at the time. I have no idea what sort of "price" you could put on such an advantage, but it's pretty high if it meant the difference between a successful evac for you and your family or stranded in a storm someplace because you ran out of fuel or starter battery charge.
And now with the aftermarket modding of hybrids into true plug-in hybrids, and some manufacturere making noises like they could offer them soon, the economics might be better, as one could conceivably keep the batts topped off from a solar array or wind charger at home, reducing reliance on both the grid and on fossil petroleum fuels.. now what the jerk government might do about road taxes then I have no idea, as this is such a variable and subject to non engineering related political change overnight. They would most likely switch to more monitoring and charge you by the mile traveled via some blackbox gizmo. That's one annoying part in all this, politics always gets involved. "here's a tax credit, go electric or hybrid!" "whoops, because our road fuel tax income just dropped, now we have to monitor you and charge by the mile and offer you an urban "congestion fee" alternative.
With all that said, I would like a pure electric vehicle, with the generator part that makes it a hybrid contained in a trailer for longer trips. Best of both worlds then, and no need to cram all the hybrid drive train stuff inside the vehicle..
I was already sick of the "Hybrid cars won't save you lots of money, therefore they're all hype" argument, but this just goes way too far. What loser spent a week making all those formulas and writing it all up?
Points these nutcases seem to not get:
1) It is entirely possible that within the lifespan of a brand new car, gas will be many, many times more expensive than it is now--even more expensive than the hypotheticals of this argument allow for. A hybrid is a hedge against the possibility of out-of-control prices. Even if the event that necessitates a hedge's existence never happens, the purpose of the hedge is still valid.
2) Buying a hybrid makes people feel good. You cannot put a value on that.
3) When someone buys a hybrid, we all win, so just STFU already about the hype!
No sane person has ever or will ever use a mathematical formula to decide whether to buy a hybrid.
Honda Accord at 33MPG is a good start....
Q: How would you like 45+ MPG? A: Get a VW Jetta TDI or Passat TDI...
The Environment is the ONLY "winner" that matters.
Until this country (the US) and to a lesser degree the rest of the world realizes this simple concept, we will never solve this problem. Environmental protection must trump ALL other concerns from economics to convenience. This is non-negotiable, and governments must be used to enforce this as individuals (yes myself included) have proven repeatedly that they are too selfish and immature to do it on their own.
With such technology in place, demonization of petroleum would then be less justified. The efficiency of hybrid vehicles would obviously still be relevent, but the issue would cease to be environmental and become purely economical.
With current technology it's hard to beat the convenience of liquid fuel. Hydrocarbdon recycling technology would not require such a dramatic change of infrastructure as electric or hydrogen power - that in itself would have enormous economic and associated environmental benefits. It would also present a parallel avenue of development for existing oil companies, creating incentive for them to actually support an environmentally friendly technology rather than to thwart it.
This is very relevent to those of us living in California, for example, where the government is spending billions in an initiative to roll out a hydrogen-based transportation infrastructure. That is CRAZY in light of Thermal Conversion technology.
A-Bomb