But overall, Hybrids (at least the three that CA lets into the carpool lane) do get better milage- hwaaaay better milage. And, thus the owners are rewarded for making the air cleaner by getting a small bennie when driving during rush-hour.
No gas only car comes even close MPG-wise. There is one diesel that comes close, but due to other considerations (sulphur emissions I think?), you can’t buy it in CA.
I guess that depends on your definition of “hwaaaaay better”. Civic hybrid gets 51/49 mpg (city/hwy). The Toyota Yaris gets 34/40 mpg (city/hwy), and the Smart gets somewere between 40 and 60 mpg, depending on whose figures you believe. These seem pretty close to me, considering a Ford Explorer is 15/20 mpg.
Assuming then an average milage of 50MPG for the Civic Hybrid and an average of 37MPG for the Yaris, the Hybrid gets around a third better. That’s significant. And the Yaris is a smaller lighter car than even the Prius.
Yeah, but you’re comparing a mid-sized sedan to an intermediate-sized SUV.
If your beat-up BMW X3 [1] got better gas mileage in both modes, THEN it’d be a good analogy.
[1] Good example: It’s German and around the size of an Escape… http://www.automotive.com/2006/09/bmw/x3/index.html
It is a matter of perception.
Bad habits that waste 10% of potential gas milage on a 20 MPG car is only 2MPG
on a 60 MPG car it is 6 MPG
naturally your going to notice a 6 MPG difference easier than a 2 MPG difference/
Bad driving habits I am sure can far exceed 10% reduction of potential.
did any of that make sense? I am not so good at explaining what runs thru my head sometimes.
Osip
Of course, in reality, given the way consumption works, the difference between 20 MPG and 22 MPG is a much bigger chunk of your monthly budget than the difference between 60 MPG and 66 MPG.
1000 miles per month at 20 MPG on $3/gal gas is $150.
At 22 MPG, it would be $136, a nice $14 monthly savings.
1000 miles per month at 60 MPG on $3/gal gas is $50.
At 66 MPG, it would be $45, a much less noticeable $5 savings, even though the 6 MPG seems more important than 2 MPG…
nod yep, see I notice what kind of miles I am/was getting not the money spent a month on gas.
All depends on what you are using as a point of reference.
I still don’t understand why automakers can’t build a fuel efficient engine nowadays. My 1987 Chevy Sprint ER (Suzuki Cultus in Japan/Pontiac Firefly in Canada) with the 3-cylinder engine gets a consistant 45 miles per gallon. It gets a little over 50 MPG on the highway and around 42 in the city. Most of my driving is highway.
I checked into the hybrids by Toyota and Honda a few months ago and the dealers pretty much told me that I wouldn’t be able to average 45 MPG in any of them.
So my little 3 cylinder engine is being rebuilt and I’ll drive it for another 200k miles.
I drove a Sprint and Sprint Metro for a while. A friend asked the same question you just did. Basically, it comes down to that the Suzuki/Chevy/Geo Sprint/Sprint Metro/Metro had a one-litre engine. It was great in the city. It was pretty good on the flats. but throw a long hill in the way, and… not so good. I was in the Sprint Metro once and wanted to pass a bus on a sweeping curve on the freeway. It had about 100,000 miles on it, and it couldn’t get past the bus’s slipstream. They got great mileage, had a surprising amount of room on the inside for such a small car, and had pretty good handling. But I think people want more power. And until they became the Geo, they were kind of ugly. (Not that I cared. I like the Scion Xb.)
You have stepped into a political quagmire that has more to do with the way that Congress writes the laws than anything else. The New York Times recently published an article about this very situation:
How GM lobbied the hybrid tax incentives to keep Toyota from further eating their lunch.
As for the hybrids that are on the market, they are not econoboxes. The Prius, the Honda’s, the Lexus RX-400h and the Ford Escape are not cheapo cars that are designed to just give high gas milage. They are nice cars with good or excellent performance that also deliver good gas milage. Yes, you can buy four wheels and an underpowered engine that will give better gas milage. If you just want great gas milage get a scooter. If you want a nice car that suits a variety of needs and makes you feel that you aren’t compromising on comfort and performance then check out the hybrids.
This is how we ended up with a vehicle that gets only passable gas mileage when compared to all vehicles. We needed a high-clearance four-wheel-drive vehicle that could seat five, and the other cars that fit that description are SUVs that get around 15 to 17 mpg in town. The non-4WD Escape hybrid gets better mileage than ours, but I don’t see the point in buying a boxy car that’s harder to get into than a sedan, rolls over easily, and has lousy rear view if you don’t need to take it off-road.
More on-topic: I thought the point of the HOV lanes was to reduce the number of cars on the road, not simply to lessen gas consumption and emissions. It’s all very well to encourage people to drive fuel-efficient, clean cars, but it’s better public policy to do everything you can to keep more cars off the road entirely. Fewer cars means less congestion, less wear and tear on the freeways, and fewer accidents. And one car, even one that doesn’t get particularly great mileage, will use less fuel and put out less exhaust than two or three.
The real question is whether or not it could take off from a treadmill if it wasn’t in stop-n-go traffic.
Whoo-hoo! 5,000 posts! My biggest accomplishment of the day.
I see that most of these points have been touched on, but I thought I’d add my $0.02
A hybrid drivetrain will allow you to get either a) similar performance but better mileage (Prius or Civic hybrid or Ford Escape) or b) better performance with similar mileage (Accord hybrid). The reason for (a) is that the gas engine can be made smaller and the electric motor can kick in when power is needed. The reason for (b) is that the electric motor can provide a boost beyond what the normal engine can deliver - in the case of the Accord hybrid, it’s the top-end V6 engine.
Hybrids are more efficient at highway speeds than similar contemporary cars because, as was mentioned, they usually employ low-rolling-resistance tires and aerodynamic aids, and they have (generally) smaller gas engines that are optimized for fuel efficiency. The reason that they may only match an older economy car (such as a Chevy/Geo Sprint or Honda Civic <-- I had an '85) is that the performance is not comparable. One can no longer buy a 3 cylinder 1L car, or a 76 horsepower Civic. And the Civic, for example, has grown in weight to accomodate new safety systems (ABS, air bags, side-impact door bars, etc.), increased electronic management and pollution controls, and conveniences (sun roofs, power windows, cup holders(!), etc.)
Driving style matters for a conventional car since it determines how much gas you burn accelerating up to speed, and then how much energy you waste by braking to a stop (for example one may save fuel by anticipating traffic lights or by being aware of the flow of the surrounding cars). Driving style is even more important in a hybrid, because it also dictates whether the gas engine must be started - if one is constantly flooring the throttle (calling up the engine room for max thrust, in other words), then the gas engine will cycle on frequently and less use will be made of the battery pack, which can be charged regeneratively.
To the OP - it depends on what type of stop-and-go driving vs. what type of freeway driving you consider. If it’s constant 40 mph cruising vs. stop-accelerate-to-40-oops-stop-again-now-accelerate-again-wait-better-brake, then the cruising is better. If it’s rolling along slowly with mild speed changes vs. screaming at 80 mph, then the slower one is probably better. From my experience, traffic can be so different - it may be real stop-and-go, where you are essentially gridlocked. Or it may be periodic jams, where everybody comes to a screeching stop but then just about immediately accelerates back up to 60+ (and you’d better be on the gas hard if you don’t want to be a rolling road block). There has been a lot written on where hybrids are most efficient, but I’d bet it boils down to essentially driving like a grandma on her way to church on Sunday.
Yep, that’s what I’ve found. I sometimes commute on a road where I’m consistently going about 40 mph and that’s where I get the best gas mileage, no question.
I’m a Prius owner, and I regularly make long trips of about 95% highway driving well into the state of Maine from the greater Boston area, about 175 miles each way, and I can easily make the round trip and drive to work for a week on one tank of gas. When I can on long highway trips, I stick it in cruise control at 75 MPH. In hot summer weather with the A/C on the whole way, I’ll get about 46-48 MPG. On very cold winter days, the same drive with the heat on the whole way is about 42-44 MPG.
Use of a small Atkinson cycle i4 plus the electric drivetrain and regenerative breaking (the Prius can also recover power going down hills, even without the brake pedal engaged, if propulsion isn’t required for some or all of the downhill roll to maintain speed) gives considerably greater efficiency than a conventional drivetrain with equal horses in a car this size. As far as I can tell, the media sketicism about highway performance is bollocks, at least when it comes to the Prius.
It’s true I get a lot better milage in the city. Tooling around Boston and environs I’ll easily get close to 60 MPG, but why would anyone say a Prius is not more efficient on the highway than an equivalent car? It simply isn’t true. Since I’ve gotten a bit savvy about tweaking my driving habits, I average around 51 MPG for my daily commute, which includes about 15 miles of highway, 20 miles, total, around 70mph on average on the highway portion, and stop-start on the city portion. There are two other Prius owners at my workplace, and they report very similar numbers to my own. One guy claims he routinely gets better than 50 MPG on long highway trips, but he drives 65mph tops. In my experience, the Prius is about the only car I’ve ever driven that actually gets close to its EPA rating if you drive the speed limit. If you make lots of jackrabbit starts, stomp on the brakes, and otherwise beat on the thing like an idiot, you will certainly erode milage considerably, but that’s true of any car.
You make an excellent point that often gets overlooked by the hybrid detractors. Yes, the hybrid often does not meet the EPA estimates in “real world” driving. Nonetheless, you can absulutely kill the gas milage in a conventional car by driving like a jackass, which is something that we too often see. Does the hybrid detractor ever tell you that his POS clunker that is rated at 25 mpg actually only delivers 16 mpg because he drives like an idiot? No, he just wants to bash the hybrid.
The point being, if you put otherwise identical cars (for instance, the Lexus RX330 and Lexus RX400h, one being conventional and the other being a hybrid) the hybrid will deliver BETTER PERFORMANCE with better gas milage. Does it save you money? That’s not really the point. It is superior technology and a better performing vehicle. Pick your poison, you can pay the Arabs or you can pay the Japanese.
In response to the OP:
The benefit of using the carpool lane is arriving at the destination sooner, not (necessarily) burning less gas.
I routinely see commentary along the lines of “Hybrids only get 40 MPG on the highway, so you’re better off buying a conventional compact if you do a lot of highway driving.”
If one drives a Prius at an average 85 MPH with lots of aggressive accelerating, one can certainly get it down to 40 MPG. I’m not aware of any conventional gasoline-powered automobile sold in the US that could get much more than 30MPG under the same conditions. Certainly nothing in the midsize range (the Prius is roughly equivalent to the Toyota Matrix/Pontiac Vibe in passenger and cargo space). Any car with an ICE that you drive fast and hard will get lower milage than it can under more sane conditions. Yet I’ve seen a number of critiques where the worst-case Prius is compared to the best-case Corolla. I fail to see how this is supposed to be informative. Certainly a conventional Civic is a quality car, and very efficient for its class. If the budget is tight, it’s are excellent option. But the hybrid version is demonstrably better in terms of fuel efficiency under all but the harshest conditions.
The cargo space for a Prius is not equivalent to a Vibe.
14.4 cu ft prius vs. 19.3 cu ft for the Vibe - cargo space with 2nd row up
(I think Prius 2nd row folds down now, early versions did not)
905 lb paylod for Prius vs. 1150 lb for Vibe
No roof racks (via OEM) or towing for Prius
Vibe has 1500 lb towing capacity and will hold a 75 lb roof load in it’s luggage rack.
Plus I could buy a lot of fuel with the $5000 I’d save choosing a Vibe over a Prius.
To think of it in a different way, it would take me a long time (several years) to see the return in money saved in fuel while driving a less capable vehicle.
I did not say equivalent, but roughly. The cargo and passenger volume in the Prius is still larger than for a compact like a Civic or Corolla, and it is listed as a midsize.
The second row does fold down, 60/40. You can’t tow much with with a Prius, but it is possible to buy and use a small receiver hitch for a small trailer (such as can be used with a motorcycle, or a small boat trailer…I have the hitch on my car, btw, and have towed such a trailer without any problems…we’re talking maybe 300lbs, though, so it’s nowhere near the Matrix’s towing capacity, and I’m pushing things as it is), and it is possible to purchase roof racks relatively inexpensively. I’ve seen lots of people on the highway with bikes and kayaks on their Priuses.
A person would have to have a Prius for many years to have the hybrid drivetrain pay for itself. My estimate for my driving habits over something like a Matrix puts me at about six years, at 20k miles per year to pay for it (I put 23k on my Prius last year, which may be typical for me these days, given all the driving to ME I do). I usually drive cars into the ground (had my last car for more than ten years), but that’s uncommon. Nobody should buy a current hybrid model to save money on gas unless they drive like me. It might be a nice fringe benefit if prices stay up around $3 or more/gallon, but I think the usual motivation is to reduce CO2 a lot, and reduce other emissions much more.