Where can I find data on gas prices and hybrid car sales for the last few years?

Factual Questions
1

I do math enrichment presentations one day a month at our local middle school.

I’d like to explain linear regression by analyzing the relationship between the demand for hybrid cars and the price of gasoline. “See kids: when the price of gas goes up, people buy more hybrid cars.”

I know I’m oversimplifying. Hell, the data may not even bear this out. But I’ll discuss that in the presentation.

I’ve googled a bit, but can’t find good data covering the last 3-4 years.

TIA.

2

Ok, I can actually solve part of this equation for you. My wife is an economist for the Energy Information Administration, which is part of the Department of Energy. If you go to www.eia.doe.gov there are downloadable statistics for the price of gasoline going back to 1993. You can sort and pull the data to fit your needs.

Please tell me this is useful, my wife will be thrilled.

3

That solves half of my problem – thanks!

Now I need to find hybrid car sales, as a percentage of total vehicle sales, over some period.

4

You might get some info from this Wikipedia entry by following the links.
Hybrids

5

Maybe these will help? Alas, since I’ve never taken a class on statistics, I’m not sure exactly what sort of data you’ll need to make your point.

hybrid car sales in 2005/2006
some comparisons

There also seemed to be a lot of statistical stuff at the NADA site, although much was beyond me.

If you do find the data you need, would you post it here? Since you raised the idea of a comparison, I’m now interested!

6

What you want to find are “market share” numbers.

There are forecast numbers here,
some sales numbers here(PDF)
These are just a couple of what I got searching using Google - bear in mind that the most recent numbers I was finding that way were 2005. My specific search terms were “market share” “hybrid cars”, though adding additional terms would help you narrow from the 76,000 results I got.

I may have access to more recent numbers through work (I’m an academic librarian with a business subject specialty), but I’m assuming you don’t have access to the resources I have. You can check with your local public or academic library and see if they subscribe to Business Source Complete (or Premier), ABI/Inform, or even better, MarketResearch.Com Academic - those may have more recent numbers available.