What I learnt from charging my Prius

Not at all. Where did you get that I said anything of the sort?

The energy management system of the Prius is carefully designed and constructed, and disturbing it could negatively affect gas mileage. Certainly disturbing it in the way you describe would; the energy storage unit (which gets its energy from where? GASOLINE, thank you) does more to extend the power you get from the gasoline, than it takes away by its presence.

It is not a true dual-fuel car; a dual-fuel car means that you can switch from one fuel to the other, with neither having any connection or influence on the other. The gasoline fuel is used only to create electricity to charge the batteries that power the wheels.

Therefore, this discussion boils down what is the definition of a "hybrid vehicle". You say the Volt is not a hybrid because the gasoline engine does not directly power the wheels. The other viewpoint is that it is a hybrid vehicle because the gasoline engine charges the batteries that power the wheels.

Unless you all can agree on the definition of terms, you'll never come to an agreement at all.

-- Michelle

Well, except when you have a tailwind. :-)

Well, from gasoline and, of course, from a tailwind, braking or going downhill.

Tailwind and going downhill puts energy into the car. Going downhill, of course, presumes that you used gasoline to go UPhill in the first place. And both tailwind and downhill affect ANYTHING on wheels, regardless of its energy source or lack thereof. A soapbox derby racer benefits from both of those.

Braking, though, is way different. Braking puts ZERO energy into the system. On a Prius, braking recovers, doesn't create, energy--and then it recovers only SOME of the gasoline-based energy that was expended in making the car go.

The only actual source of energy that motivates the Prius to go out of your garage and drive around town and go back into the garage is gasoline.

That the Prius has a system to capture SOME of the kinetic energy available from braking, and expend it later, is irrelevant. The energy it recaptures came from the gasoline itself, and it doesn't come near to recapturing all the energy that the gasoline went INTO the system with.

Trains and submarines aren't hybrid vehicles; they call them diesel-electrics.

Trust me when I tell you I understand your reasoning but it's the ability to capture and store energy that sets the Prius apart from the conventional car and regardless of the source, wind, braking or coasting, the Prius has the ability to run on that energy in it's stored electric state. If I too wanted to split hairs, I could argue that a Volt plugged into my house is coal fired because most of my electricity comes from coal.

All of the diesel train engines I've seen dissipate the energy captured during braking in the form of heat because they have no way to store the energy to be used later for propulsion. Perhaps there are some that pull battery cars and I'm not aware of them. I don't know about subs, but a diesel-electric train isn't equivalent to what we have come to know as the hybrid automobile.

I have yet to see a Volt travel on rails or under water.

That the Prius happens to use electricity and batteries as the method to store recaptured energy, doesn't make it an electric car.

And yet, stupid people who want SO hard to believe they have an electric car, think otherwise. They're ignorant, of course.

It's not splitting hairs to say that the Volt when plugged into your electric grid is NOT a zero emissions vehicle at any time. Carbon emissions are created in order to insert energy into your Volt.

Now, if you use strictly a solar panel setup to collect energy and put it into your Volt, that would make it zero emissions up to the point where the gasoline engine fired up. If you ran it strictly under 40 miles between such solar-based charges, you could legitimately say you have a zero emissions vehicle.

But people, who are by and large stupid and don't grasp even the basics of the world in which we live--and pride themselves on that ignorance--will insist otherwise, will ignore the Volt's engine running, and will say they have an all-electric vehicle.

Not quite. If the solar panel is hooked up the electric grid, you're still using energy that would have reduced the use of fossil fuels. And, it took energy to make the solar panels. So it still takes fossil fuels to power solar-powered electric cars.

Trie.

And the tires leave carbon on the pavement, some of which mixes with the oxygen in the air and becomes C02.

The cars also use oil and grease (for lubrication) as well as other products made with oil, like plastics and rubber tire. And all of these products require energy to make, which involves burning fossil fuels.

In other words, using electric cars still involves using fossil fuels, even if the direct source of energy is electricity or even solar power.

You folks need to live in a cave. That will be good for the rest of humanity. BTW, don't breath. Thankyou.

The solar panel setup in question is dedicated to providing power to the Volt--at which point, should you never exhaust the electric energy inserted into the car courtesy the sun, the car is zero emissions.

You have a habit of denigrating others. By doing so, you denigrate yourself. Grow up.

Sorry if you don't like hearing reality.

Why do you behave like this? Didn't your mother teach you manners?