I would take issue with this article wondering about the future of the hybrid car. It seems like an opinion piece masquerading as news.
The thrust of the article – that hybrids aren’t The Solution to all of life’s (i.e. driving’s) ills – is certainly true enough, though I’m not sure why exactly it needs saying. There’s rarely if ever an ultimate product of technology, since we’re all so very clever when it comes to coming up with marginal improvements on known processes (and also devising entirely new solutions to old problems). Anyone claiming that any technical process cannot be improved upon is likely trying to sell something. But countering hype is by no means an unworthy goal. My issue is with the very content-free way in which the author essays this. For instance:
Hybrid operating costs also need to be heeded.
Do you drive at the speed of traffic on the highway in less than ideal conditions (i.e., when it’s windy and the road is hilly?) Or live in a climate where you use your car’s defroster or air conditioning (which, here in Ottawa, where we go from winter frost to summer humidity over lunch, is about 365 days of the year)? Using the condenser in the A/C system uses more power, which uses more fuel.
If this sounds like your driving lifestyle, you can pretty much forget about achieving the typically surreal fuel consumption estimates that most hybrids claim.
Well, yes. Gas mileage on hybrid cars are affected by all of the factors that affect the gas mileage of all cars. The suggestion here – one with no evidence presented for it – is that hybrid cars are more prone to these ills than anything else on the road.
I drive a hybrid, as you might have guessed; an ’02 Prius, specifically. During the summer I usually expect my MPG over a full tank of fuel to be between 42 and 47; in the winter, it drops down to about 35. These are lower numbers then the idealized mileages you see posted at the dealership; they’re also still better than the idealized mileages of the vast majority of other cars on the road, to say nothing of the real-world performance of those cars.
This is his second of three arguments against hybrids. The first is that they’re expensive to own
, by which he actually means expensive to purchase
, and that’s pretty much true; the market for hybrids being what it is, it’s hard to get dealer discounts etc. on them. The third argument is that they’re no fun:
The final reason hybrids may end up as a passing fancy is that, in a traditional sense, they effectively remove the act of driving as a visceral experience.
… and I don’t have the vaguest idea what he’s talking about. My first car, bought in 2000, was an ’82 Datsun hatchback. You want visceral? There’s a car that you really feel in your guts. I hadn’t realised that this was a desirable feature. Or does he mean that it’s impossible to drive excitingly (i.e. dangerously) in a hybrid? A friend of mine bought an Insight when they first came out, and I’ve ridden with him; trust me when I say that you can still be as insane as you please while driving a hybrid.
Or possibly I agree with him. My own driving experience in the Prius I’d describe as cerebral rather than visceral. Unlike my experience with any other car I’ve driven, the Prius feels like an extension of my body (more of a whole-body glove
, to quote a character in Good Omens) and so the perception of driving seems closer to being unmediated than in other cars. That might just be due to the amount I’ve driven it, and if I’d driven any (non-Flaming Datsun of Doom) car several thousand miles I’d feel the same way about it.
(I’ll admit that the response curves on the pedals are different on the Prius than other cars, and so it’s harder to make the transition between it and a non-hybrid than between two non-hybrids. Maybe that’s what he means: when he’s tried driving it it felt awkward, and hence not visceral
enough for him. In which case, he’s taking a personal opinion and universalizing it.)
I’m pleased, incidentally, that people are working on alternative ways to get the benefits that hybrids enjoy. Some of the Prius features (stopping the engine rather than idling, for instance, or the CVT) are good ideas independent of the hybrid drivetrain and deserve wider dissemination. However, it seems to me that the author of the article, having spent many paragraphs de-hyping the hybrids, immediately falls into hyping up their competitors/successors. Leaving aside the issue of viscerality, it seems like the new European diesels he’s describing would almost certainly suffer from the first two ills that he accuses the hybrids of. So why the sudden lapse in criticality?