April 2nd, 2005

This Arti­cle points out that a few ‘hybrid car tinkerers’ have mod­i­fied their cars to get upwards of 180 miles per gallon in their cars. Basi­cally, they have added the option to plug their cars in overnight (or when­ever) to recharge the high-​capacity bat­ter­ies housed in their hybrid. This decreases fur­ther the need to use gaso­line, and some of the people inter­viewed claim they only visit the gas sta­tion once a month or so.

Sounds amaz­ing, right? Before we all run out to get hybrids, let’s get a few things straight. The sup­port­ers of this method should really state cost per mile, not miles per gallon. Here comes the math:

The arti­cle says that it can cost up to $3,000 to add these bat­ter­ies to the car (which usu­ally cost any­where between 3-5k more than a ‘normal’ car in the same class, but we won’t factor that in). Let’s say you own a Prius, and you were get­ting 50mpg before you modded you car, and now you aver­age 100. At $2 a gallon for gas, you would have to ’save’ 1,500 gal­lons of gaso­line to break even on your invest­ment, a whop­ping 150,000 miles. How many car owners drive their car for that long?

Addi­tion­ally, the arti­cle does not take into con­sid­er­a­tion the cost of elec­tric­ity to charge the car - and by the way the arti­cle is worded, the people who are inter­viewed charge their car daily, to save on the cost of gas. The author also does not take into con­sid­er­a­tion the cost of new bat­ter­ies, and the cost of dis­pos­ing of the cur­rent ones when they go bad.

I really want this coun­try to focus on energy con­ser­va­tion and reduce our depen­dence on for­eign oil - it’s essen­tial to resolv­ing the cycli­cal nature of our cur­rent for­eign policy in the middle east. How­ever, the mar­ket­ing hype pro­duced from hybrids makes me sick. All elec­tric­ity does is shift the emis­sion of pol­lu­tants from one source to another. Until we come up with some­thing viable and clean, I’m afraid the stran­gle­hold the oil indus­try has on the U.S. will not be going away any time soon.

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9 Responses to “Hybrid Cars”

1. BicMan says:
   April 4th, 2005 at 5:56 pm

   What we need to do, is har­ness the power of stu­pid­ity. We’d never run out of energy, then.
2. Daniel says:
   April 5th, 2005 at 4:57 pm

   It’d be our number one export.
3. Cory says:
   April 11th, 2005 at 2:28 pm

   One inter­est­ing study I read recently talked about the elas­tic­ity of gas prices. Basi­cally, elas­tic­ity is a spe­cial ratio that describes how much more (or less) of a prod­uct will be pur­chased with a decrease (or increase) in price. A prod­uct that is highly elas­tic is one where a small increase in price will pro­duce a large decrease in quan­tity sold. The study I read said that gaso­line is very inelas­tic, which means that changes in the price don’t cause much change in the amount pur­chased.

   I don’t know how things look where every­one is at, but here in Spokane, WA, gas has increased $.50 a gallon in the last 10 days. Although that’s an enor­mous increase (basi­cally a 25% increase in price in 10 days), it doesn’t do much to change peoples’ con­sump­tion habits. Instead, what people do is eat out less, shop less, etc.

   This is one reason why I think there is a lot of hype about hybrid cars. Basi­cally, with­out all the hype, very few people would buy them, because gas is a rel­a­tively inelas­tic com­mod­ity (and reduc­ing gas usage is basi­cally the only reason to pur­chase a hybrid car).

   Some­one should start a com­pany that lia­sons between cor­po­rate restau­rants and com­pa­nies work­ing on energy effi­cient cars. Because, to some degree at least, the restau­rant indus­try is being hurt by the reliance on gas and increase in gas prices. Com­pa­nies like Shell or Exxon aren’t really being hurt greatly by increases in gas prices, com­pa­nies like Brinker Inter­na­tional are (owner of a bunch of chain restau­rants). There­fore, it would seem log­i­cal that com­pa­nies like Brinker Inter­na­tional might be inter­ested in fund­ing research and devel­op­ment into alter­na­tive fuels, energy effi­cient cars, etc.

   I’d like to see better public tran­sit sys­tems in cities. I know this was a topic of con­stant debate during my stint in Atlanta. But hon­estly, I wouldn’t mind gas going up to $10 a gallon if it would pro­voke cities to develop good subway sys­tems.
4. Daniel says:
   April 11th, 2005 at 9:01 pm

   It does make you wonder what it’ll ever take for Amer­i­cans, or really humans, to care about the prob­lems we are caus­ing for the not to dis­tant future. I’m not envi­ron­men­tal nut, but it’s appar­ent that this is a resource that we won’t have for much more time.

   The fact in over a hun­dred years, the best thing auto makers have come up with is “hybrid cars” (and it’s still a tech­nol­ogy that’s not exactly proven) is rather depress­ing. Guess it shows what hap­pens when you have the oil indus­try up your ass.
5. Cory says:
   April 12th, 2005 at 4:43 pm

   Bar­ring national con­flicts like war and stuff, there is still a con­sid­er­able amount of oil out there (at least a 50 year supply). The tran­si­tion off of oil is going to be a long term project. Con­sid­er­able increases in oil prices is a good first step to less­en­ing our depen­dence on it. This is not to say that I favor unnat­u­rally increas­ing oil prices to pro­mote change. I just think oil prices will prob­a­bly rise con­sid­er­ably in the medium-​run future (next decade or so) and inno­va­tion will increase more and more as this occurs.

   Maybe some­one will rein­tro­duce the bicy­cle! That’s trans­porta­tion that runs on a regen­er­at­ing source of energy. People with bikes can help people with roller skates “carpool” by drag­ging them with a rope. Granted, it may seem a little funny at first, but once lots of people are on the band­wagon, no one will feel the slight­est embar­rass­ment. (The exer­cise involved may help solve the sec­ondary issue of obe­sity).

   As a side note, I went to a lec­ture on Karl Marx last night. It is inter­est­ing to know that there are some Marx­ists still out there that are anx­iously await­ing rev­o­lu­tion to over­throw the cap­i­tal­ists. The lec­ture was given at Gon­zaga Uni­ver­sity and there were so many people in the lec­ture hall, that some folks were forced to sit on the floor in the aisles. Granted, there were some incon­sis­ten­cies in the speak­ers words and actions. He admit­ted he drives an auto­mo­bile, lives in a nice house, and receives a more than ample salary from the uni­ver­sity. But by the end of the lec­ture, he was ver­bally call­ing for rev­o­lu­tion (which I found some­what dis­con­cert­ing). I had a tough time fig­ur­ing out whether most of the audi­ence was with or against the speaker (my atten­tion was split evenly between the lec­ture itself and the very attrac­tive stu­dent sit­ting next to me).
6. Daniel says:
   April 14th, 2005 at 11:40 pm

   Sit­ting next to a cute girl will do that to you.

   I have the same prob­lem with marx­ists and the like. They may have a few good ideas in prin­ci­ple, then they go and ruin it all with their aspi­ra­tions of over­throw of the Fed­eral Gov’t. I just can’t take them seriously…

   But back on topic, I think that as prices go up and up, cor­po­ra­tions will scram­ble to get in on the ‘next big thing’ in the energy world. Sadly, it’ll be at the point where we are paying $5+ a gallon for gas, min­i­mum. My next place of res­i­dence HAS to be within walk­ing dis­tance of lots of places I can do my day to day shop­ping, to keep my gas usage to a min­i­mum. I’m llking my cur­rent “fill up once a month’ gas cycle.
7. Cory says:
   April 16th, 2005 at 3:40 pm

   Strangely enough, except to drive to work, I walk every­where. My apart­ment is within walk­ing dis­tance to almost every­thing nec­es­sary to live (shop­ping, gro­cery, bars, restau­rants, coffee shops, book­stores, gym, bank, etc). If I would have just gotten a dif­fer­ent job here in the down­town area (instead of 10 miles away), I would prob­a­bly rarely ever drive my car. Proof pos­i­tive that living in a city can work well even if the city is small.

   How­ever, it’s too freak­ing cold up here, so I’m going to fly south with the geese some­time soon.
8. Daniel Andrews says:
   April 16th, 2005 at 8:00 pm

   I walk to class every day, walk to the gro­cery store (unless I’m buying 50-100 bucks worth of food in one stop), and to the bank. Unless I’m out run­ning errands that don’t involve those basics of living, I rarely drive my car.

   It’s really amaz­ing. Since I’ve arrived in Orlando, I’ve only put about 6 thou­sand miles on my car. I’ve made 3 trips home, at 1k per round trip. So, in the past 8 months, I’ve only driven my car about 3 thou­sand miles around this area… and most of that is to the beach and back. I’ve really pro­longed the life of my car by walk­ing every­where.
9. Carlos says:
   October 13th, 2005 at 1:47 pm

   Cory, I am inter­ested in read­ing the study you men­tion regard­ing gas price elas­tic­ity. Can you point me in the right direc­tion to get it? Thanks