Not the only one. Ask toyota USA. Toyota sold milion around the world. I undertand that you think the USA is the world, but I have a news for you. Its not!, Only 5% of it :-).
Again thats not the point. Even if there is 8mil hybrids in the USA and they get 40% better MPG, its even not 1 Nuclear power plant.
So you can save oil much more effectively than by producing and driving lazy expensive hybrids that will never have any reasonable ROI. :-)))
Unless, you invent much better batteries that have about 10 times beter ratio between weight and stored energy and cost less then lion :-)))))))))))))))))
This guy is terminally stupid - he can't do the quote syntax - he continues to insist someone said "Toyota sold a million hybrid in the US", even though he was told only johny said that.
I have an idea for you, buy a bicycle. It has better mileage than all hybrids will ever get, in a trafic jam, its even much quicker. In china they already know that, so you should move there. :-)
In an average hybrid, you carry about 500 pounds of batteries and other equipment?
-quite a lot of material which goes to waste (how about the energy needed to produce it?)
If you go the same speed, in the same car on the same road with 500 pounds of load - what do you think which car has a better mileage? Hybrid or classic?
Yes of course the classic one!
The only advantage of hybrids is when you actually stop (or move very slowly in a trafic jam).
Do you know that the hybrids having a very good mileage are very lazy and have a very small engines compared to the same models?
Lets do some calculation.
Lets say there will be a milion hybrid (there is not at the moment) cars with an average of 5 mpg (in reality its even less) more than comparable classic car - it means these cars will save up to a 100 galons of gas a year per car on average . (its no more than 400 USD, which will never pay for the extra money for 500 pounds of batteries, but lets put that aside for the moment)
In total its 100 000 000 galons a year in fuel. Lets say that 1 galon of fuel in an oil power plant produces 20 KWh of electrical energy (actually its less). Its 2 000 000 000 KWh a year saved. SO because a year is 8760 hours - lets say only 8000 h - we get 250 MW
What do you say, that all hybrids in the USA do not save more than a 1/4 of 1 nuclear power plant block. 1 average nuclear power plant has an electic output of 4 000 MW - thats like 16 milion hybrids. 16 mil hybrids - thats 4 milion tons of batteries and other equipment to produce and liquidate.
I have just one logical conclusion - hybrids are a colossal hype.
There is still about 10% of energy produced in oil power plants in the usa. Thats a lot of nuclear power plants.
John
You joined this group just to post this? Maybe you should do a bit of reading before you blurt stuff out like this...
I have a Ford Escape Hybrid, and it gets about 30MPG. When I rent a similarly equiped Escape V6 (it has a bit more power I'll grant, the the FEH is closer to the V6 in performance than the 4) gets about 21MPG (I got 20.8 in my last trip driving from LA to San Diego). Thats more like 10MPG or 33% difference. I have the 4WD and I conpared it to the 2WD V6, so it was a bit skewed in favor of the V6 in that regard. Many FEH owners here get above 30MPG regularly.
Comparing the fuel saved to the output of a nuclear plant is irrelevant since I cannot carry a nuclear reactor in my car, just fossil fuel. What I am reducing is fuel consumption that is non-renewable and spews among other things, greenhouse gases. Cutting that by 30% is a good thing.
By the way, when comparng cars, why not compare a Toyota Camry to a Camry Hybrid so you are comparing apples to apples. Try taking the difference in price (spec them out the same, don't take a basic Camry and compare it to a fully loaded Camry Hybrid) and see how long it would take to pay it off with a 30% improvement in MPG.
At the end of the day, everyone makes a choice as to what is important. I don't think too many people join car mod forums and expect to have people justify the price of new mag wheels or the huge sound system in their cars. We pay for what we want. Many of us want to reduce needless emissions, and in this case, we can reduce some without changing our lifestyle (low lying fruit as it were). If a better car comes out, be it hybrid, electric or some magically low consumption gas car, then we'd all go for it. We can go further by leaving the car home when we can and do other things as well. It is simply a step in a series of steps that we are all going to have to take have a more sustainable lifestyle. Go ahead and take whatever steps you think are neccessary, but do some research before you rag on what others are doing.
I have an idea for you, buy a bicycle. It has better mileage than all hybrids will ever get, in a trafic jam, its even much quicker. In china they already know that, so you should move there. :-)
Idiot Alert: bicycles not allowed on the interstate.
Finally,
Rcomeau I would like to thank you. I do not have anything against your choice to buy a hybrid. I am just against government incentives and the hype. Hybrids have and will have its own place. They are particularly good for people who live in big cities, use it to go to work and spend a lot of time in trafic jams. Thats the place for hybrids. Hybrids are not that efficient for long highway drives.
I am just alergic of our government giving out the incentives from our taxes to produce hybrids, ethanol from corn, incentives to oil companies etc. That drives me crazy. The same government does not do nearly enough to stop burning oil, coal, and natural gas in big powerplants which produses the real amounts of CO2 (production of corn for ethanol actually produces extreme quantities of CO2 compared to other fuels). That was my point, not the users of hybrid cars. I wanted to have a real discussion. You are the first one and i thank you for it. My point was, that we can change much more by pressing the politicians to let build nuclear powerplants than by buing hybrid cars.
Ok... as much as it pains me to agree with some of what Johnny is saying because he is coming off a bit as a troll (but I don't think that was his main attempt).
I agree, I don't think you can change the world with a hybrid as much as many on this forum think they can 1 (tiny tiny tiny) step at a time. There are other things that we can do that will have a greater influence on the world as a whole. I think hybrid technology can do better at the current cost. I see non hybrids catching up and I see many diesel surpassing existing hybrid technologies. MINI for one is coming out with a diesel that has many of the features of a hybrid but is not a hybrid and gets 70+ mpg. Impressive numbers imo. Guess what though... it's not coming here!!! I'm pissed at that.
Finally,
Rcomeau I would like to thank you. I do not have anything against your choice to buy a hybrid. I am just against government incentives and the hype. Hybrids have and will have its own place. They are particularly good for people who live in big cities, use it to go to work and spend a lot of time in trafic jams. Thats the place for hybrids. Hybrids are not that efficient for long highway drives.
I am just alergic of our government giving out the incentives from our taxes to produce hybrids, ethanol from corn, incentives to oil companies etc. That drives me crazy. The same government does not do nearly enough to stop burning oil, coal, and natural gas in big powerplants which produses the real amounts of CO2 (production of corn for ethanol actually produces extreme quantities of CO2 compared to other fuels). That was my point, not the users of hybrid cars. I wanted to have a real discussion. You are the first one and i thank you for it. My point was, that we can change much more by pressing the politicians to let build nuclear powerplants than by buing hybrid cars.
Thanks again
Hi,
Thanks for the reply. To be fair, I do think most of your facts are wrong though.
While the difference between the hybrid and non hybrid lessens on the highway, they still do a lot better because the engine is smaller, and they run on a different valve timing to be more efficient. The valve timimg (called the Atkinson cycle) increases efficiency at the cost of power, but the electric motor is used when accellerating hard which more than makes up the difference.
I agree that corn is not the most efficient source of ethanol although I think it is still beter than straight gas. Try googling "Ethanol production emissions" and you can get the latest discussions. It takes energy to produce ethanol, but it also takes energy to pump oil, move it across the earth and turn it into usable fuels. I won't go into the geopolitical costs as well. There are a lot of promising ways coming down the pipe to make ethanol from cellulose (basically any plant remnants) that can make this even better. Add to that the fact that we are using material that was only created recently, so we are using the carbon cycle (sun & plants make fuel from CO2, we burn plants to release CO2 and get energy, then sun and plants take back the CO2...) rather than take carbon that was stored millions of years ago and putting it back in play.
Another aspect of hybrids is that they have become an easy thing to point at and say "get one of these, and you will reduce your emissions". Since we are trying to get millions of people to make changes, the simpler we can make the changes, the more likely they will happen. Hybrids look like regular cars, smell like reguar cars and drive like regular cars and save gas and reduce emissions. Easy! I got my first hybrid a year ago, and I don't regret it for a second. I'll no doubt continue to get a hybrid until they stop making them or some better technology is made available. As for government grants, hybrid owners pay taxes as well, and we have tax incentives for all sorts of things, many not as helpful to all of us. They could extend the credits to other high efficiency cars and I would not complain. I'd rather see penalties for guzzlers (we are actually going to do that here in Canada soon). If everyone got a hybrid, emissions wolud drop 20-20% instantaniously without changing a thing in their daily lives. Cars make up a significant portion of overlal emissoins so it is nothing to sneeze at.
We'll have a lot more difficult choices to make in the near future and we'll need to come up with better ideas than hybrids. In the meantime, it is a step in the right direction and we might as well take it. Waiting for somethong better is like waiting for a faster cheaper computer, There will always be one next week, but in the meantime, the abacus is getting a bit old.
Re: Few facts to think about (hybrids)
