From Guest Blogger Chris Green: Hybrid – the Next Step Towards Guilt-Free Motoring?
It’s becoming increasingly important to find cars and driving habits that will reduce our dependence on traditional fuel, while limiting the amount of CO2 and other emissions produced by vehicles. Guilt-free motoring, both in terms of what our cars produce, and how much strain on our bank accounts it produces, is probably not going to happen anytime soon. However, hybrids represent one way of lowering your individual debt by investing in cars with dual electric motors and batteries. Hybrids are now a commonplace option for drivers, with all major car manufacturers producing them.
Hybrid Types
There are a variety of hybrids available for drivers, from the more standard mix of a combustion engine and an electric motor, and other fuel sources like natural gas and petroleum gas, as well as larger hydraulic vehicles. Cars that have a petrol or diesel engine running with an electric motor and battery are the most popular. Parallel hybrids particularly run on the two engines as options that can be switched between, with the chance to run a car on the electric motor only – a Honda Insight represents a parallel hybrid.
Milder hybrids include a compact electric motor that contributes to automatic stopping and starting, power assists, and storing energy in brakes for recycling into the engine. Other versions include specific parallel hybrids like Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive, which alternates the two power sources, and uses variable transmission to allow drivers to select different driving modes. Series hybrids, by comparison, rely much more on an electric motor, with a combustion engine as a backup in case of power failure. Plug-in hybrids also place more emphasis on power from an electric motor, conserving energy from a combustion engine and reducing emissions.
Benefits
The main benefit to owning a hybrid car is that they tend to provide a much lower mileage than other vehicles. This higher fuel economy can be seen in a Toyota Prius, one of the most well established hybrid designs, which produces around 56.5 mpg. Hybrids also don’t release as many emissions as cars that only use combustion engines. As a result, hybrid drivers receive lower or no road tax if their cars fall below certain emission levels. The green credentials of a hybrid are typically developed by manufacturer choices to use lightweight, recycled materials in the chassis and interiors of a car, as well as special tyres that reduce friction and boost mileage. In this way, a hybrid car can last much longer, and deliver a greater overall mileage, than comparable vehicles.
Examples
The most popular hybrids are the ones that have been available for the longest, with the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight being among the most successful. Luxury hybrids are also available, and are represented by cars like the Lexus RX 400h. Other popular hybrids include the Honda Civic compact car, and the Ford Fusion, which offers more space. The Ford Escape Utility brings together sports utility size with a hybrid engine, while Mercedes-Benz have released their own S-Class Hybrid. Other luxury hybrids include the Porsche Panamera S Hybrid, and the BMW 5-Series Hybrid.
It is important, though, to briefly consider some of the drawbacks of a hybrid. Primarily, the starting cost is generally higher, although you do get more out of your mileage over time, as well as reductions in road tax. Hybrids tend to work best as city and town cars, rather than for long range driving, where you may have to rely more on a traditional engine. There’s also the prospect of full electric cars becoming more widespread in the near future, whereby emissions and mileage will be further improved by battery powered vehicles. For the time being, though, a hybrid is worth looking into.
About the Author
Chris Green is a motoring enthusiast with a bit of a green streak, Burton on Trent’s Toyota dealership converted him to the virtues of hybrid cars – now he just can’t shut up about them!
You have a nice summary of the benefits of hybrid vehicles but when you jumped into the morality issue regarding relative guilt from driving, you lost me.
Even if you had a plug-in hybrid and derived 100% of your charge from your own solar panels, you would still have to account for the capital investment that could have been used to feed the starving children in the African Sahal.
Don’t forget the carbon dioxide released in producing the solar panels, the vehicle and its construction, and the plant with all that nasty concrete where the construction takes place.
Seriously, we can’t get away from an environmental impact from our necessary and our discretional use of energy and technology by spending our way to nirvana. The only way to take the moral high ground is to reduce, reuse and recycle. That means a Sunday afternoon pleasure ride in your new hybrid vehicle should not earn you moral brownie points.
We should not be buying more efficient vehicles so that we can drive them even more miles than we drove the gas guzzlers. That trip to the store for a 6 pack of soda is still morally questionable IMO whether it is in a Prius or a Ford Expedition.
Making a fair comparison is not always as straight forward as they appear.
Hybrids like the Prius certainly use less fuel and produce less emissions on the road than otherwise similar cars, and if what you want to achieve is improved urban air quality, then hybrids have a lot to offer. On the other hand, if you want to minimise emissions and other environmental impacts on a cradle to grave basis, it is far from certain that the hybrid is the best option.
I have read comparisons that indicate that a hybrid needs to drive around 100,000 miles before cradle to grave emissions drop below those of conventional cars. I am not sure that this is current, but what I do know is that the embodied emissions (emissions associated with materials and manufacture)of a hybrid car with an aluminium body, a substantial battery pack and electric motor is higher than for other cars.
…what I do know is that the embodied emissions (emissions associated with materials and manufacture)of a hybrid car with an aluminium body, a substantial battery pack and electric motor is higher than for other cars.
And, that aluminum body is one of the keys to evening it out in the manufacturing column of energy indebtedness. We need to build those cars from recycled aluminum, rebuild the electric motor for subsequent owners,and recycle the lithium just like we do lead from conventional batteries. Until this happens on a large scale, the environmental benefits of a hybrid are quite limited. I do believe we are on the right track though. The early adopters are paving the way for the rest of us who insist on doing the number crunching before we tout the benefits.
While you make some good points there Larry wouldn’t charging your hybrid car 100% of the time from your solar panels be better than charging it from a fossil fuel energy 100% of the time? I think yes. What about all the carbon emission from mining the fossil fuel then burning the fossil fuel to create the energy needed not to mention transportation. While we may need to mine for some materials to make solar panels I sure we can use recycled materials and they need to be transported but at least once they are made, they no longer produce carbon emissions. My point being is we need to make changes and while we all want the cleaner and greener. Sometimes I feel people need to be more supportive and stand as one rather than faulting each other or being to critical to the point where we loose sight of the main objective. Which is to lower our overall ecological footprint and if this means that hybrid cars are helping thats a good thing right? Because every little change add together equals an overall bigger change. Yes?
I feel we are getting into a perfectionist discussion, trying to solve every little negative embodied emission instead of going ahead and start step by step, producing hybrid cars charged with a little solar, a little wind, a little fossil fuel to make our environment a little better at a time. Like Nicholas here says, we are never are going to get where we want if we don´t start by solving problems one at a time, the ones we can tackle now and the rest as we grow into an entirely green society? A standard gas guzzler produces all these embodied emissions also; we aren´t going to build cars out of wood or grass (sustainable materials if done with measure), so better use recycled aluminum, and so on.