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News Flash!
News Flash!
I get asked this question a lot. My answer is usually something like this,if you have unlimited funds, money is not an issue but the environment is and you want to do your part to protect it, then by all means buy a hybrid car just for the sake of reducing your carbon footprint. The truth of it is that unless you drive a hybrid car until the wheels and almost everything else falls off of it, you most likely will not get a return on your investment through gas savings.
You see most hybrid electric cars run on both gas and electric, however they recharge themselves through braking. This is great if you live in any metro area like NYC or LA where you spend most of your time driving in traffic. At that point your hybrid will be running mostly on its electric battery that will be forever charging itself during your braking of stop and go traffic or stop lights. If you live where we do here in NEPA, then most of your driving is probably highway or cruising country roads with little to no traffic or stop lights. In this case you are financially better off buying a small economical used car that gets good mileage.
Any savvy consumer knows that buying a used car is the best dollar value. Most of the depreciation comes off the car in the first year. Plus there is an environmental bonus to buying a used car. You are already saving tons of CO2 emissions buy buying a car that already exits rather than buying a new one that will consume vast amounts of energy and produce CO2 in its production. Since most are assembled in the Midwest or over seas these automobile plants are run on old coal fired electric plants which are the biggest contributor to green house gases and global warming, and it takes a lot of energy in the form of electricity to produce a new car and all of its components. Most cars these days are not made in one place. In fact the whole of the car in parts will probably come from almost a dozen or more different states, countries and continents requiring gas and oil to transport all these parts to a central assembly plant and then ship the car to the dealer via, ship, train and truck. So you see just buying a normal fuel-efficient used car locally is a greener way to buy.
My husband, Vlad Potiyevsky, is an architect who works for a firm in Goshen, NY 60 miles away. That's 120 miles a day or more if he has to visit job sites. We looked into buying a hybrid to do the right thing for the planet, but discovered the issues I mentioned above and realized since we didn't have unlimited funds and we needed financing to buy the car, the best we could do was to buy a used Honda Civic that gets us 40 miles to the gallon on his highway drive down Interstate 84. Now a Toyota Prius gets 48 miles per gallon on the highway but we would have had to buy new at the time and when we did the math the extra premium we would have had to pay for the new Prius, we never would have made that back in saved gas money. Yes it would have polluted slightly less but would have cost us a lot more in the long run. Some day when we can buy a car for cash and not think twice, a used, not new, hybrid would then be our choice.
Now what I really don't understand is all the people who are still driving SUVs and Trucks to get groceries or run errands, especially on sunny days. You really have to ask
