I think the original article in question is overly negitive but as copyboy1 mentioned that balances the overly pretty picture painted by the 100% positive hype on the other end scale. Many of the article's points are true. Is it better do be impressed that a car does better than the article said or dissapointed that the car does not live up to the hype?

I love my HCH and it is doing tons better than the EPA numbers but you don't need to look any farther than our own mileage database to see that on avearage the hybrids are not getting what the EPA numbers suggest. The Civic is by far the closest only missing by a couple mpg. Some of the others are quite a way off. Not one Accord has hit the EPA average yet. Yes I know it is winter and that the cars are all new but do the other customers?

Linux has the same problem. Lot of really smart people are thinking "well heck all you gotta do to start the print services is type "/etc/init.d/cupsys start"". What all those "smart" people don't realize is that people don't want to type in "/etc/init.d/cupsys start", they want to click on an icon that says "start print services" or they want print services to start automatically.

We are the smart ones that don't get it when it comes to hybrids. The average person is gonna drive a hybrid the same way as they drive their regular car paying no attention to the settings and not taking the weather or traffic into account and they are going to be dissapointed in their hybrid which is not a good thing for the hybrid market. Yes it is their own ignorance that is the real problem but there is no shortage of ignorance in the world.