Gotta’ chime in on Johnny LA’s side here.
I had a 1978 Mercedes Benz 240D weighing in around 3300 lbs empty with a 62 HP engine. I personally verified a sustained level road top speed in excess of 80 MPH with 3 friends in the car on the way back from Wilmington one night when I was in college.
I concur; I have the same car right now (actually a 1983, but same weight and power) and it can easily maintain 80 mph. It takes about a minute to get there though, and fuel consumption is considerably worse at that speed (I get 30 mpg in daily suburban driving, and I got 24 mpg on a recent road trip at 60-70 mph.)
Yeah. It’s amazing, but if I calculate right:
62 HP burns 3.1 gallons of diesel in an hour (assuming 20 HP per hour per gallon)
and moves you 83 miles.
That means your little car SHOULD do right around 26.7 MPG flat-out.
That just blows my mind.
It should be no suprise that hybrid gas mileage is more sensitive to driving habits than gas mileage of conventional vehicles. Here’s a study done at Argonne that demonstrates the sensitivity of hybrids to agressive driving.
However, saying that “virtually every meaningful advantage of a hybrid car comes back down to changing your driving habits” overstates the case. Look, for example, at Car and Driver’s road test of a Ford Escape hybrid. In the article, they briefly mention a comparison to the conventional Escape. Admittedly, they didn’t explicitly state that they were not modifying their driving habits for the hybrid, but it seems to me unlikely that would be the case.
Also, admittedly, it’s difficult to compare apples to apples even when looking at the same vehicle in both hybrid and conventional versions: the powertrain is different enough that the overall performance is simply different. However, Car and Driver’s testing gave the hybrid Escape a 33/29 mpg on their city/highway loops, compared to 22/26 for a 4-cylinder conventional Escape (one that performed poorer on acceleration tests than the hybrid). Comparisons to a 6-cylinder conventional Escape were a bit better.