At 4/14/09 04:17 PM, Malachy wrote:
my camry hybrid is actually pretty efficient. It tells you what it's gas mileage is for the whole tank and your mileage for each trip (a little graph showing how well you're doing). It resets the tank average every time you put gas in.
it's a little backwards from normal cars since it gets better mileage in the city, since the electric engine runs best in low-torque and slow moving.
The car typically gets upper 30s miles per gallon (38-40MPG) in the summer and usually 30-35 in the winter, because of winter tires and cold temps meaning the engine runs to warm the car up.
I'd imagine if you got rid of all the extra bells and whistles, you could knock the MPG up to 45, maybe get some after market batteries to ad to it .
the ratings on the websites for what they get are pretty dead on. the prius gets 50mpg in the summer as far as I know.
and, for most hybrids the money you save in gas does not pay off the premium you pay to get the hybrid model for a long time. with the camry, the one I have, it has the quickest pay-off to premium, in just 2 and a half years. My car is already saving me money since it is 3 years old now. I think the honda civic model takes almost a decade to pay off the extra you pay for the hybrid model compared to the standard model with all the same accessories minus the electric motors.
Oh, yes, I do understand that, for the most part, while they are being driven, hybrid cars at least keep up with their petrol or even diesel counterparts and, in some cases, can outdo them (as you said, city centres are a good example). But I was more thinking about before they're being driven, while they're still being manufactured in the workshops. Most people (celebrities?) who buy a fancy hybrid seem to forget that the actual driving of a car is a minute percentage of its total carbon footprint compared to the footprint it has while it's being built and while it's being safely disassembled & disposed of.
So, in my personal opinion, a car that actually has a fairly low MPG may be more fuel efficient in the long run than a car that has a higher MPG if the low-MPG car is very easy to build and destroy. Of course, it'd be better to combine the two to get the ultimate fuel-efficient car, but cars having air conditioning, Bluetooth, satnav, ABS, traction control, climate control etc etc etc is pretty much mandatory nowadays.
Of course, another funny little fact is that 95% of the world's electricity is made from burning fossil fuels, and it's much less fuel efficient to create electricity using fuels, then use the electricity to power the car than it is it simply use the fuels to power the car.
I'm not saying that hybrid cars are bad. I think that, with some more modern refinements and more improvements in the way we create electricity, they could be very, very useful in the future. However, at this moment in time, they really aren't as life-saving as the car companies make it out to be.
