Feb
11
Written by:
Renato.Eccher
2/11/2009 9:30 PM
Have you ever wondered, especially after doing some quick math, who really benefits from you buying a hybrid?
I drive a 2001 Honda Civic and was thinking about buying a new car. The obvious choice is to buy a hybrid, reducing the weekly fuel cost and doing good for our earth. Soon after that thought and browsing online fot tht hybrid comes the sticker shock. Why are hybrids so much more expensive? And are they really saving overall energy consumption?
The Cost
Maybe you save that higher purchase price with the money you save at the pump? Let’s do the math:
| |
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
| Civic 2009 LX |
29mls/gal |
344 gal/y |
$17,000 |
|
|
| Civic Hybrid |
42mls/gal |
238 gal/y |
$23,000 |
28 years |
$9.5 / gal |
A: fuel consumtion as advertised on edmunds.com
B: yearly fuel consumption with an average of 10,000 miles / year
C: sales price of a new model
D: years that it takes to recuperate the higher cost $6000/106gallons/ $2/gal gas price
E: how expensive the gas needs to be to recuperate the higher cost in 6 years $6000/6 years/106 gallons
The hybrid saves about 106 gallons a year. But the gas price needs to be at almost $10 / gallon to recuperate the higher price of a hybrid within 6 years.
The usage carbon footprint
Obviously, you do not save money when driving a hybrid, but the 106 gallons that you use less a year, propels your hybrid another 5.2 month. This is a quite impressive difference!
The dependency on foreign oil
Use less fuel period!
What about the total carbon footprint
There is a lot of talk about the true carbon footprint of a car; i.e. the total energy that it takes to manufacture, to use and of course to dispose a car. It is clear that the hybrid takes more energy to manufacture, since it has two engines, lots of batteries and just more parts in general. In addition, it is also really hard to dispose used batteries. There is a report (“Dust to dust”) floating around from a marketing company that claims that a Hummer beats a hybrid in overall energy consumption. But, this report has got hammered itself by several other web sites for being flawed. If you are interested to read it here one link with the report in it: Read Report
My Summary
You don’t drive a hybrid to save yourself some money, but it sure feels better at the pump and you sure help out our earth and your children.