If you’re interested in personal transport and the environment, chances are you’ve heard about hybrid cars.
You’ve also probably heard the claims made about their good fuel economy and low emissions, as well as the jeering from individuals claiming it has no better fuel economy than a standard car.
So, who’s right? They both are!
If you drive aggressively, you’ll get terrible mileage with any car, including a hybrid. Possibly even slightly more so than with a regular car, in fact, since the hybrid relies on a bank of heavy batteries for storing power.
If you drive sensibly, however, your mileage will improve radically. With any car, certainly, but more with a hybrid than with a regular car.
I’ve test-driven the most well-known hybrid car, the Toyota Prius, daily for a couple of weeks.
I intentionally tested both styles of driving, both on short and long trips.
For the first days, I always accelerated up to the speed limit as quickly as I could, kept the accelerator depressed as long as I could before I had to stop, and generally tried to keep the gas engine running as much as possible. The fuel economy was, quite predictably, not very good – I averaged 30 miles per gallon (7,8 liters per 100 kilometers).
I then moved on to a more sensible style of driving. I accelerated (relatively) slowly, tried to keep the speed as constant as possible and avoided any sudden bursts of speed. After two weeks of this, the fuel economy was quite different: 69 miles per gallon (3,4 liters per 100 kilometers), on average. Pretty good.
So, you can get good fuel economy from a hybrid car if you drive it the right way. A better fuel economy than pretty much any other comparable car, at that.
Is a hybrid car still spewing too much greenhouse gases to the atmosphere? Sure.
Would the world be a better place if everyone that really has to drive around switched to a purely electric car. I think so.
Does that make hybrid cars pointless? No way.
A large scale shift to electric cars in the immediate future just won’t happen. Their range is too short at the moment, and there are too few models to choose from. Given time, though, I’m sure they’ll be a feasible solution for 95% of all driving needs.
In the meantime, we’ll have hybrids as an intermediate solution that will improve things a little and give car manufacturers valuable experience.
For a look at some other aspects of hybrid cars, have a look at Hybrid Car Myths at the GoGreen blog.
This post was tagged with: cars, fuel economy, gas electric, hybrids, hypermiling, mileage, prius