The Dot Com Pho table has always been filled with many individuals with different opinions. For example, there are those who believe in the current trend of green cars while some of us such as myself think they’re stupid. I mean, I’m not just being a petrolhead on this one. Hybrids are genuinely not as green as people think they are.
I wrote a paper on this back in university, showing research that finds that producing the nickel in a hybrid car’s battery is more damaging to the environment than driving a combustion engine for around 150,000 miles. That’s right, you don’t get any of the green benefits of a hybrid until you’ve driven around in it for that long and well, after 6 years on the road, my Mazda 3 is hovering around the 40,000 mark in mileage.
In addition, it’s not about what you’re driving…it’s how you drive it. If you speed a lot, a Prius is no more economical than a regular car. You have to drive abominably slow for it to only use the electric engine. Plus, most hybrids aren’t even the most fuel efficient cars on the road. In other parts of the world that aren’t North America, there are diesel engine cars sold that nearly double the MPGs of a Prius.
And we’re not even talking supercars. In my opinion, supercars should just not be touched with this ridiculous technology like Porsche’s new 918. It’s possibly the best looking Porsche I’ve seen in a long time (911s and Boxsters are rather ugly) but it’s utterly ruined by the fact that it’s a hybrid. $600,000 should buy you a car that sounds like the Hulk is brushing his teeth with rusty chainsaws. That and supercars are, by nature, greener than any hybrid…because usually they sit in garages and not being driven on the road.
I don’t know…maybe when someone figures out a viable solution for hydrogen-powered cars, I’ll be convinced but for now, give me fuel burners any day.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree with you! there’s an unjustifiable hooplah surrounding hybrid cars…and i would recommend people not to go for them until their viability as eco friendly cars has been established!
Nicely put. I find the whole hybrid mania to be just a craze at this point. Celebrities do it to get attention, and so on. Not saying there’s no practical benefit for it as there is, but at this point, there has to be a better solution than what’s on the table for it to get to where people buy those over conventional cars.
I think this has the point. I will not prefer hybrid cars until this has some good output.