Monday, December 10, 2012

Hybrid Cars May Not Be As Great For The Environment As We Thought

So you bought yourself a hybrid and you're helping to save the environment right? Maybe not. Consumer Reports says Ford has been inflating the mileage on its hybrid models. Instead of getting “47 city/47 highway/47 combined mpg” as advertised, the Fusion sedan gets 35/41/39 and the new C-Max wagon gets 35/38/37. Heck, my friend's 1997 Honda Civic gets that.

That’s a pretty big difference — especially when the common philosophy is that hybrid drivers are generally those who drive a lot becuase the only way to break even when buying a hybrid rather than a regular gas-powered car is to driver about 12,000 miles a year.
Here's the story from DC Streetsblog.

2 comments:

Charles said...

My dad was a mechanic and he was always against buying a car with a huge motor to drive around town, the big cars are slow to warm up and short trips are very hard on the big motors, so I have a small car with a 4 cylinder engine that gets 30+ miles per gallon when I drive it some in town and some outside of town. I looked at the hybrids getting 40 miles per gallon and it would take me 20 years to get the extra cost out of a hybrid and that does not count anything for extra repairs on all the complicated machinery in a hybrid.

SRTC Staff said...

20 years?? Yeah, not worth the investment in my book. Especially because they say the batteries in the hybrids are at least a couple thousand dollars to replace!


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SRTC is the federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for Spokane County. Urbanized areas with populations exceeding 50,000 people are required to have an MPO. SRTC was formed to address the county's transportation planning needs. It provides coordination in planning between the public, cities, small towns, the county, the state, transit providers, and tribes.

SRTC offers services including transportation monitoring, transportation modeling, census information analysis, travel demand forecasting, historical traffic count analysis, geographic information systems, and trip generation rates.