When I hear people talk about hybrid cars vs. a "regular" car, quite frequently the major topic is naturally mpg. After all, that's the major reason why a lot of people want to buy a hybrid. There is a premium on hybrid cars, and they want to recoup that money over the lifetime of the vehicle. That's very understandable in this age of $3.25/gallon gas prices. But if your only comparison of whether or not you should buy a hybrid lies in the EPA mpg estimates, or even the cost of one versus the other, you're missing something pretty important, because guess what... if you could find a non-hybrid car that got the same mpg as a hybrid, you'd still be putting more pollutants into the air.
While hybrid cars are largely about how little gas you can buy, they're also about how little poisonous gases we output from our vehicles. If you think climate change isn't real, and that it isn't caused by all the bad stuff we humans put into our environment, then you can stop reading now because you won't get it. But if you believe, as the vast majority of the scientific community does, that climate change is an enormous threat to our health, our way of life, our food supply and our weather patterns, then read on.
Climate change isn't the only thing being affected by our air quality. I live in a city that has regular ozone warnings in the heat of the summer, and I am one of those people in the sensitive groups. Childhood asthma and other pollution-related diseases have exploded in recent years, I believe in large part due to air pollution. The numbers don't lie. You can read the statistics on the CDC website here.
So back to hybrids vs. non-hybrid cars. While it's certainly laudable for someone to buy a fuel-efficient non-hybrid vehicle, and it's definitely preferable to driving a gas hog, there's a myth out there that if you could find a regular car that gets the same mileage as a hybrid, there's an equal cost to the environment. Unfortunately, that's just not true.
There are several websites out there with calculators for determining the pollutants coming out of your tailpipe. I like the one on HybridCars.com here, because you can compare two cars side-by-side. Their calculator is what I will use for the below example.
Let's take a Chevrolet Cruze and compare it to a Toyota Prius. Not a fair fight, you say, as the Cruze is rated at 28 mpg and the Prius at 50. But I'll adjust for that in a second, hang in there. I chose the 1.4L (smaller) engine for the Cruze in this example. The Prius has a bigger 2.0L 4 cylinder. I then put in 10,000 miles driven every year, and $3.25 for the price of gas. As expected, the Cruze cost quite a bit more in annual gasoline expenses, but how about pollutants? Let's assume Chevrolet had found a way to make the Cruze some kind of non-hybrid wondercar and it was now rated at the same 50 mpg as the Prius. Currently it has 56% of the Prius' mpg rating (28 / 50 = 56%). So let's look at adjusting the Cruze's pollution output by this factor.
The carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) emissions of the Cruze for the year would be 6,729 lbs. vs. the Prius' 3,830. 3,830 / 6,729 = 56.9%, or roughly the same percentage as the mpg between the two. But how about other pollutants? Aha! Here's where the big differences lie. Carbon monoxide output for the Cruze is 37 lbs. vs. 14 for the Prius. 14 /37 is 37.8%, in other words, the Prius has 37.8% of the carbon monoxide output of the Cruze, which you will remember, gets 56% of the Prius' mpg rating. Nitrogen oxide and hydrocarbons are reduced as well. The Cruze clearly would produce more carbon monoxide than the Toyota even if Chevy waved a magic wand to get it to 50 mpg. One of the reasons for this is that the hybrids will shut down their gasoline engines at stoplights and most will cruise on the electric motor until reaching a certain speed.
Carbon monoxide is a poisonous greenhouse gas that also contributes to smog. Nitrogen oxide mixed with hydrocarbons produces ozone and smog. See the ehow post about these pollutants here.
Here's the bottom line. Just like buying organic food vs. non-organic isn't all about whether there's an equal stack of nutrients, but all about avoiding bad things like pesticides and GMOs, buying a hybrid car isn't just about mpg. It's about saving the environment and the way we now live. If you're out looking for a new car, think about the total picture and not just the EPA mpg estimate.
Some may ask why I haven't mentioned all-electric cars or plug-in hybrids and not just gasoline-electric hybrids. That's because for some of us (myself included), plugging a car into an outlet in a garage isn't possible because we don't have a garage! But just think about where the electricity for a plug-in hybrid comes from... usually coal (which is never clean, despite the PR the industry has been putting out), or in my case, nuclear power, which has its own set of problems. Not to mention there's the range limitation. Unless you have more than one car, the other one being able to use gasoline, most people won't live with just one vehicle that's all-electric.
Full disclosure... for the next couple of days I will be driving my 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid, which is being traded in for a Ford C-Max hatchback hybrid. Why did I not buy a Prius in the first place, you ask, instead of the Civic? Well, right about now I'm wishing I had! But actually I've driven a Prius and frankly hated it, OK, maybe just disliked it intensely. I also found it hard to see out the back to change lanes, and I'm not the only person I've heard of with this complaint. I decided I would sacrifice some mpg for the sake of safety in this case, considering the options I had at the time. The Civic used to, if I drove it right, get a combined highway/city mpg of 40-43, which is not bad, but as it has aged -- and Honda has had to put in a software fix to keep the hybrid battery from draining out completely at stoplights -- the mpg has suffered some and it now averages about 37-38 mpg.
The C-Max (which shares a hybrid powerplant with the new Fusion Hybrid), has gotten a lot of press lately as Consumer Reports has been unable to reproduce the 47 mpg it's rated at. I could write a whole 'nother long post about how mpg for hybrids and electric vehicles is calculated, but suffice it to say that some owners have been getting lower than this, some higher. This is a very new car and Ford's user manual even says you shouldn't look at mpg until it's broken in, around 2,000-3,000 miles or so. Not to mention, it's very hard to come up with mpg ratings for a hybrid as it depends entirely on how they're driven, at what speed, and even weather conditions. Having driven a hybrid for five years I can tell you I can get vastly different readings on my car at different times.
My normal commute ranges from 35-55 mph, with quite a few stoplights, and the C-Max is designed to run on the electric engine -- which gets its power from regenerative braking, so in essence it makes its own power -- up to 62 mph, much higher than any other hybrid currently on the market. We'll see. I was loaned a brand new C-Max for about an hour and I consistently ranged from 40 mpg to pegged out (the mpg indicator only goes to 60) as it switched to the electric motor only. I didn't take it on the highway, having driven it on the same road I would normally take to work and to do most of my daily errands. So it's hard to say what mpg I will hit, but I will be thrilled if a large chunk of the mileage I put on this car comes from the electric motor, and I didn't have to plug it in. Cross your fingers.
BTW, I don't want anyone to think I'm advocating a certain car or make over another, just wanted to give readers an idea of my personal hybrid experience. Like I said, full disclosure.
I realize that hybrids and electric cars of any sort can command quite a price differential (which will hopefully be evened out as more and more of these cars are sold), and I also realize some people just aren't able to go the extra cost. That's certainly understandable. But if you are fortunate enough to be able to stretch the budget, and you're looking for a new car with better mpg your main criteria, take into account not just the number of gallons of gasoline you'll save but the pollution savings as well.
