by Tobias Van Buren

Created on: April 15, 2008   Last Updated: March 05, 2010

Does it pay to buy a Hybrid car?

I'll tell you right off, as far as I'm concerned - NO!

It may seem so in the short run, but perhaps not in the long run. One must consider a few things:

The hybrid car has only been on the roads about nine years (Honda Insight and Toyota Prius), maybe a few years of non-road testing before that, hardly long enough to know if they'll hold up as long as proven gasoline-driven cars over the whole 20th Century into the few years of this one - the 21st. Cars these past fifteen or so years are even proving to last longer than those before them, and they certainly had lasted at least ten years or more before - a certain amount of maintenance necessary, some costly repairs now and then. People owning gasoline-driven cars knew and know what to expect over the years they owned/own them - a few, to ten or twelve years, and beyond. People owning hybrid cars do not know what to expect, since they are now the guinea pigs, the ones who will show the rest of us if these cars will 'go the mile', so-to-speak - if you know what I mean - be as hardy as the gasoline-driven cars, to prove or disprove them as worthy enough to trust, be as reasonable on the wallet or pocketbook, so people in the next half of this generation will buy them. It will take ten or fifteen more years for us to know, maybe even twenty years - for the necessary improvements and changes to be made. By then, we might already be seeing come onto the roads the all-non-gasoline-driven car - hydrogen, electric, whatever. Some prototypes are already here

The hybrid car, to me, is a very transitional car whose purpose will be to pave the way for an entirely new fuel source car, with no dependence at all on gasoline. With hybrid cars, there still is the dependence - a constant turning off, turning on, turning off and on again (are there actually two engines or certain parts - inter-related ones - that enable just the one engine, to run these two different ways?). It depends on the kind of driving ones does - urban or rural, stop and go, not so much stop and go, speeds, constant or not, traffic, high-speed highway driving, and the degree it of it all. Gasoline is still the fuel needed on high-speed highways, certainly if one wants good pick-up!

I've heard of many recalls of hybrid cars, though they don't want to publicize it much, not like they do gasoline-driven cars, since the whole experiment might just fall flat! I've seen evidence of many that have broken down on the roads. Apparently

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