Makers of the first hybrids got it gas backward. Here's a look at the next generation, the Chevy Volt, my electric car, and the truth about hydrogen, biofuel, and electric pollution.
Conventional Hybrid
Hybrid cars, for all their Green Chic, are the wrong car for the millennium. In their first generation, the manufacturers of hybrid cars got it gas backward.
Hybrid cars still get mileage that’s not as good some pure gasoline cars. That’s because hybrids, although a good start, are hobbled by a fundamental design flaw: They were designed to use gasoline first, and electricity second.
Electricity is the least-polluting, cheapest, most efficient way to run your car. But a conventional hybrid gets all of its power from ordinary gasoline.“Hold on,“ you say. “My hybrid has an electric motor.“Doesn’t matter. Every watt of electricity that that motor uses you got by burning gasoline from your tank. Face it. It’s an electric motor that runs on fossil fuel.
Here’s how it should work: Electricity first, fossil fuel second. In other words, no matter where you drive, your first 50 miles ought to be purely on electricity. Every time. Only if the batteries run down, say after 50 to 100 miles, then and only then do you switch to your gas tank. That’s called a plug-in hybrid.
Most automobiles travel less than 40 miles before they are parked, and while they’re parked, they can be charging batteries. Parking this way, many of us would go months without seeing a fuel pump at all.
Driving on battery power costs 3 cents per mile; driving on gasoline costs 23 cents per mile. I drove an electric car for 4 years, and to “fill up the tank” cost me $2.40.
You want to talk pollution? A fraction of the power coming through your wall socket is generated with fossil fuel; whereas all of the power coming from a conventional hybrid car is generated with fossil fuel.
Why do manufacturers prevent you from plugging in a hybrid? A Toyota executive once complained that electric cars actually need to be charged(!), and that, of course, the worst thing you can do to a battery is recharge it. He characterized the electric car movement as a conspiracy by some power companies. Electric operation disrupted emissions testing. American drivers find it too inconvenient. And on. Nonsense.
We’ll get into that on the next page.
