The “Break it Down” Blog

Well the results are in from our last poll, and most people agree that they would get a hybrid or alternative-fuel car once the technology improved.

Given the combination of 1st and 2nd answers totalling almost 50%, then combining the “Yes when the style improves” giving us 60% of folks basically either saying “Yes I would buy one” or “I’m waiting for them to be impressive”, it seems like a good majority of people want a hybrid car, but like me don’t feel like what is out there now is meeting their expectations. It’s hard to be that impressed with the industry-leading Prius’s 50mpg numbers when we had old Accords from the 1980s pulling 40mpg without much effort and to this day the Toyota Corolla gets close to that as well just on straight gas.

When you pay a $6k-$7k premium for a hybrid car, you expect to get something impressive for that money, but as we see with a quick rundown of how that money actually spreads out, all you are probably doing (assuming you don’t drive your cars for 10 years) is basically paying a lot for not too much, more specifically:

• Assume $6k premium
• Assume $3.50/gallon for gas
• $6k would buy an extra 1714 gallons of gas at $3.50/gallon
• Assuming you get 40mpg in your Toyota Corolla, that is 40×1714=68,560 extra miles you could drive with that money.
• Assuming an average of 15,000 miles drive a year for a US driver, that is an extra 4.57 years of driving you could do in your Corolla with the premium you would have paid for a Prius or comparable car.

There are some new developments on the horizon that are good to see (competition on price for affordable hybrids), but we aren’t quite where we need to be yet to get everyone on board.

I’ve always had the belief that people will really start caring about hybrids and alternative-fuel cars once we hit the 85+ mpg numbers and especially the magical 100 mpg numbers for a real/legitamate car and not some science-lab experiement that seats 2 people and is covered in expensive solar panels that cost a fortune to repair or replace.

Fortunately I think we are heading in that direction over the next 5 years, with cars likely in R&D at Toyota, Honda and even GM that do exactly this. But for the time being right now, it looks like a massive majority of us aren’t convinced that these 30-50mpg hybrids are really solving the ultimate problem.

So fingers crossed as we head into a new decade with hopefully beneficial energy policies that continue to drive technological advancements forward and make this a cleaner planet.