asterion:
Say what? I remember deisel always being cheaper than ordinary car fuel.
Are they making hybrid vans yet? Pretty soon, I’m sure, I’ll need to get something bigger than my minivan, and I plan to buy with an eye toward maximizing my gas dollar.
Can’t wait for those hydrogen fuel cell cars…
Would the distribution of hydrogen be any more difficult than natural gas?
Another reason city mileage is better than highway mileage is that when the car is stopped or driving at very slow speeds (at stoplights or cruising a parking lot, for example), the gas engine shuts itself off. So no gas is wasted idling the engine. I understand that this is not true for all hybrids though. My Prius will do this and I think the Camry as well, but the Honda Insight has the gas engine running all the time.
I get my best mileage when I’m driving short to medium distances on the interstate. I live near Seattle and spend a fair amount of time travelling up and down I-405, usually about 10-15 miles at a time. I am currently up to 43.2 mpg over my last ~5000 miles.
btw Airman Doors - the premium the end customer pays for a hybrid these days isn’t really that much more than they would pay for a regular car. I paid around $24K, including tax and fees and all the other junk the dealership threw on the bill. I haven’t checked recently to see what the new ones are going for these days but in a previous thread about hybrids (and I’m sorry, I don’t have time to dig it up right now, but I posted in that one too so you can search on my previous posts) someone said that the new ones were actually priced lower.
My mother works for a Honda dealership, and I asked her a year or so ago about the hybrids. She said that one of the salesmen had ran the numbers with gas being at $2.00/gal. or greater, and he said that one would be better off buying a non-hybrid Honda, since the payments on those were lower. Of course, that was a year or more ago, and might not apply to non-Honda vehicles.
A couple of things you might want to consider is what the estimated repair costs for such a vehicle might be. Really doesn’t do you much good if something breaks after the warranty period and it costs you as much as a new car to have something replaced on the car. Insurance costs are also something to consider, if a hybrid costs more to insure than a non-hybrid, that’s going to eat into your gas savings. Finally, you’ll want to look into seeing if you’ll get any tax credits for buying the vehicle. I know that Arizona at one time offered tax breaks for people buying LNG powered cars, but I don’t know if those breaks included hybrids or if they’re still being offered.
The problem with current hybrid designs is that they are really “electric” cars propped up by an on-board IC engine to allow continuous use, and you’re really not saving a lot by doing that. It is a concession to consumers who are used to the freedom of operating IC vehicles, and no total-electric car can come close to matching that. It would be more efficient for hybrids to use an even smaller IC engine, and to simply state: the IC engine is there to recharge the batteries, but the IC engine cannot charge the batteries and drive the vehicle as well. So you get maybe 8-10 hours of drive-time at full throttle, and then the car needs to sit idle for a couple hours or so for the IC engine to recharge the batteries. Heck, the IC engine might end up being only a couple horsepower–it might end up being small enough to fit in your hand–but it doesn’t make good engineering sense to build two engines into a car that can both drive the car alone, because anytime you are using one of the engines, you are hauling the dead weight of the other engine around.
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I have had a honda insight. I can only give you my personal experience here.
My average city MPG is around 58 mpg. This is of course after I adjusted my driving habits. It has almost become a game for me to see how much MPG I can get.
Most highways with few stops and not much traffic I average around 65 mpg.
The times I have driven on the interstate. I have averaged from 74 to 88 MPG.
from Nashville to Indianapolis for example I averaged 78 MPG from Indianapolis to York PA I averaged 81 (88 mpg before the hills of West virgina)
Honda’s hybrid technology is different than Toyota in a few ways.
The only time my engine shuts itself off is at stop lights. The IC engine also will add up to 7 horsepower to the transmission durring times of heavy use (hills and passing)
I also did recieve a 2k take break for buyinf a hybrid.
Hybrid tech does save a bit on gas, is it profitable in these smaller cars? depends on how much you drive. When the tech is put into larger vehicles (such as trucks and SUVs) then the cost saving will be much more noticable and profitable for the owner.
there is my two cents.
Osip
FYI, the battery pack in an 04 Prius is about 120 pounds.
The Prius uses an Atkinson engine (The intake valve is held open during the start of the compession stroke which reduces pumping losses or something)
The Atkinson engine is more efficient thant the typical Otto engine, but its drawback is that it produces less low end torque. Luckily that is just where the electric motor shines.
Note that the ICE can be both charging the battery AND driving the wheels.
Brian
Don’t really want to hijack this thread but is a motorcycle out of the question?
they are inexpensive to buy, fairly simple to operate and inexpensive to perform maintenance on (which isn’t for everyone I know, but it matters to some people and I’m sure you can’t take those hybrid cars to any ol’ grease monkey if something breaks and the dealers ain’t cheap), they get good gas milage; maybe 50-60 miles a gallon if you go easy on the throttle, and chicks dig guys with bikes.
Sure, it may not be feasible for everyone but worth considering.
Actually I have quickly considered a motorcycle, but dismissed it due to:
1 - The travel time and the level of comfort I desire
2 - Weather, I estimate that I could only use it 2 months/year once I factor in bad weather, possiable bad weather and winter conditions.
I used to know an English chick who rode her motorcycle all year round. Damn, she was hot!
Another thing to take into consideration is the weather where you’ll be driving the car. That can affect efficiency.
Here in Minnesota, hybrid cars often don’t actually get their claimed mpg during the winter, because the gasoline engine runs most of the time. (The control logic doesn’t shut it off when the engine is cold, because it would be hard to restart. (And that’s good, it saves wear and tear on the engine.) But in mid-winter, if you happen to be doing a lot of short trips in town, the engine may never really get a chance to warm up to it’s best operating temperature.)
Still, even with this, most owners think that they year-round average mpg is still better than a regular car.
Another good point. I would think the heater in a hybrid would be supplies by the i/c engine, I doubt that electric heat would be effective at all. Maybe, but I doubt it the a/c is run as a heat pump.
OK It seems like a hybrid car would not be the most practical car for these purposes.