Power, efficiency, luxury–you can have it all, and the entry price is just $53,700. That’s the price of the 2012 Infiniti M35 Hybrid, announced today ahead of the start of retail sales March 16.

Infiniti bills the M Hybrid as the only car in America to offer 350 horsepower in combination with a 30-plus highway mpg rating, and it looks secure in that title for the present. Only Porsche’s brand-new Panamera S Hybrid looks poised to challenge it in the near future, and it costs about $40,000 more than the M.

Competition from Lexus’ GS450h hybrid, which is $5,000 dearer, 10 horsepower weaker, and considerably less attractive to our eyes, should post little threat to the Infiniti–especially since the GS hybrid scores just 22/25 mpg according to the EPA.

We’ll have to get behind the wheel of one before we can render final judgment on the car’s capabilities in the real world, but considering TheCarConnection‘s 8.8/10 overall rating and strong scores in features, styling, and performance, we’re expecting good things.

This story originally appeared at Motor Authori

Hyundai is no friend to cheating spouses, that’s for sure. Of course, neither is Congress (despite the recent Craigslist antics of former Representative Chris Lee).

But perhaps we should start at the beginning.

‘Vast defect’ ?!?!?

We’ve gotten several notes over the past few weeks from Colorado reader Bob A, saying:

Hyundai Sonata HYBRID again delays release of HYBRID cars in U.S. – vast defect suspected – Hyundai has NO hybrid Sonata cars at U.S. dealers – what’s going on?

We are usually skeptical of “vast defects,” but our suspicions grew when Hyundai refused to give Sonata Hybrid sales for January. It said only that it had sold 4,792 vehicles with EPA highway ratings of 40 mpg or better, which includes the high-volume new 2011 Elantra as well as the Sonata Hybrid.

Growing suspicions

Sales of the car have begun, but Hyundai won’t say how many? Even Nissan copped to selling a mere 19 of its 2011 Leaf electric cars in December, and 87 in January. Hmmmmmm.

As it turns out, there was indeed a last-minute delay, although Hyundai Motors America CEO John Krafcik says the first 2011 Sonata Hybrid was delivered by Hardin Hyundai in Anaheim, California, in January.

But a last-minute specification change made “amazingly late in the process,” in November–with production scheduled to start in December–meant that Hyundai “ended up losing a couple of weeks of production timing,” Krafcik said.

So what was this all-important change?

Making silent electric cars noisier

It was the removal of a function that allowed drivers to disable the “virtual engine sound” that the Sonata Hybrid automatically broadcasts when it switches off the actual engine in all-electric mode below roughly 12 miles per hour.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in its wisdom–and at the behest of politically powerful pressure group the National Federation for the Blind–is writing rules that will require all hybrid and electric cars to make noise at low speeds.

There appears to be little or no actual data that quiet hybrid or electric cars have caused additional injuries to blind or sight-impaired pedestrians. Nonetheless, the rules are coming.

Changes to wiring harness, software, manuals

Knowing that, and not wanting a few early Sonata Hybrids to behave differently than later models, Krafcik said the company “made the difficult choice” in November to remove the noise-disabling ability. That was a function that had been designed into the car since the beginning of the program.

This required changes to the wiring harness, the user-interface software, and even the Owner’s Manual, which had already been finalized. Those changes were made in November and December.

So, all production versions of the 2011 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid will make engine noises even when their engines switch off. So much for sneaking home quietly late at night.

Europeans, who called the electric-vehicle-only mode on Toyota Prius hybrids the “cheating husband button,” must be laughing their heads off.

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This story originally appeared at Green Car Repor

Our reader Jonathan P asks:

I have a 1997 Saturn that, remarkably, is still running. It probably has the book value of a large watermelon, so if anything major goes wrong with it, that’s the end of that.

If that Saturn were a hybrid, I’m guessing the battery pack would have died about four years ago, give or take. But replacing a battery pack would be a huge expense, no? And the older the car gets, the less incentive there is to incur this huge expense.

So it seems to me that hybrids have a significant built-in obsolescence factor–while at the same time their higher up-front cost means you need to hold on to them longer to recoup the cost.

What, then, is the logic behind buying a hybrid…or an electric, for that matter…over an efficient gasoline or diesel vehicle?

Good question, Jonathan.

It’s not about payback, necessarily

First, many of the people who have bought hybrids like the Toyota Prius didn’t do so for the “payback,” or the money they’ll save on gasoline. Instead, they wanted the car to make a public statement about their values. Just like buying a HUMMER, only, ummmm, different.

The broader universe of car buyers who say they want a green car really want to save money. So they may or may not buy a hybrid, since retail buyers routinely overweight the importance of purchase price and ignore the impact of total cost of ownership (maintenance, repairs, gasoline cost) over the lifetime of the car.

Whether a hybrid really save you money depends on your duty cycle: whether you spend a lot of time in stop-and-go urban traffic, where its engine switches off frequently and it can move under electric power alone for short distances, or whether you do hundreds of miles a day on freeways, in which case a clean diesel is a better bet.

Designed to last a lifetime

Second, a hybrid’s high-voltage battery pack generally doesn’t need to be replaced over the lifetime of the car–or at least the first decade.

The nickel-metal-hydride (and now lithium-ion) battery packs in hybrids are very different to 12-Volt lead-acid starter batteries. They’re considered part of the vehicle’s pollution control system by regulators, so they must be warrantied for either 8 years//100,000 miles or 10 years/150,000 miles (depending on your state).

Beyond that, automakers know very well that replacing a pack (a Gen II Prius pack costs about $2,500) would be a huge customer dissatisfaction issue. The packs are built with plenty spare energy capacity, and they control them to operate within a very narrow state-of-charge range, usually between 40 and 60 percent.

This reduces stress on the pack, prolonging its life. While there’s little public data so far on how long packs last, hundreds of hybrids have been used as taxis for 300,000 miles or more, and they still run fine.

The packs may not have 100 percent of their original energy capacity, but they still function as hybrids.

Battery chemistry is key

A technical note: The battery chemistries used by most manufacturers degrade only with duty cycles (usage) and NOT with time alone. Electric-car maker Tesla is one of the few exceptions: It uses consumer-grade lithium-ion cells, which lose energy capacity over time, even if you never use them.

So, while a hybrid car owner may theoretically need to replace the pack at some point, it most likely won’t be required until around the same time the car itself becomes uneconomical: 12 to 15 years or more.

As you point out, if your Saturn loses its engine, or even its transmission, there’s no sense in repairing it. The hybrid battery pack falls into that same group of components: the ones that usually last the life of the car, and whose failure determines when the car gets scrapped.

Toyota, incidentally, has said that the hybrid battery pack is one of its least-replaced items. The bulk of them are sold to repair accident damage, not because they failed.

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This story originally appeared at Green Car Repor