Official: Toyota sells six of 10 of hybrids in California

what's the cost criteria, for buying a Hybrid VS Non-hybrid?

Is it simply miles driven? The higher the mileage driven, it pays more to buy Hybrid?

I would like a Hybrid, but I don't drive much [5,000 miles a year].

marc

"marco" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com...

Buy a hybrid, any hybrid, because it makes you feel good to go green. DO NOT DO IT FOR THE SAVINGS IN OPERATIONAL COSTS relative to buying gasoline.

If there was a car produced on both hybrid and non-hybrid platforms, the hybrid model would cost more to buy but less to operate. The mathimatical reality is that the operational savings would take longer to realize than the typical ownership period lasts. If you saved a few cents per mile on a car that costs $5000 more to buy, then you divide $5000 by the amount saved to find how many miles it takes to recover the cost. Divide the miles it takes by the miles you drive per year, and if the result is a number greater than your expected ownership term, you will never see the savings. Just to put some perspective on this, if the hybrid package costs $5000, and the fuel savings was $0.05 per mile, it would take 100,000 miles of operating to break even on the cost-up you paid to go hybrid. You (YOU personally are an aberation) would have to keep the car for 20 years to save enough gasoline costs to cover the premium they collect on a hybrid vehicle. And, I am completely ignoring the added costs of dealing with the batteries, although these costs are likely to be mitigated through lower engine maintenance costs. Assuming the normal driver travels about 15,000 miles per year, then it would still take almost 7 years to recover the cost of going hybrid, and most of us own a car for about 3.5 years. (I don't know that my numbers are anywhere near the correct ones to use, but they illustrate the math that you need to do to see if hybrid works for you.)

Is hybrid good? Probably yes. I have no plan to buy a hybrid but my instinct is that anything we can do to wean from gasoline is a good thing. But saving money on gas does not justify the purchase of a hybrid automobile. The environment is a good reason, the economy is not.

which insane in and of itself.

Getting rid of a modern car that quickly is the stupidest financial decision anyone can make--but here you are, writing about the hybrid financial decision but using this insanity as your basis.

So your original general conclusion:

is based on an utterly insane premise, and therefore is completely faulty.

When you assume that one does or should get rid of a car every 3.5 years, you have no standing to discuss how some other aspect of car ownership "makes no financial sense".

5000 miles/year? If your goal is financial advice, consider: This guy has no business buying a new car. (Few people do.) This guy should buy a used Corolla or Civic and move on with his life. But he can also buy a used Prius or Civic Hybrid and achieve both goals: save money AND specifically save money at the pump.

I just bought, from my neighbor, an 03 Civic Hybrid. Manual trans. Still gets 40-45mpg, even at 100K on the clock. Perfectly fine shape. Spent not a lot of money on it, and now the wife can drive that while she leaves the 15mpg van in the garage for the most part. Or we can sell the van. Whatever.

A hybrid like a Prius is a pure gasoline car, just like any other gasoline car. Its ONLY source of energy is gasoline that you put into the tank. It has some fancy tricks to manage and use the energy of that gasoline WAY better than other cars, that's all.

Plug-in hybrids in general have bigger batteries that can run the car further than a non-plug-in hybrid, and those cars *can* be plugged into the grid to fill those batteries, but their battery-only range is still minor and the car is still based around the gasoline engine.

the Chevy Volt is a plug-in hybrid that takes the concept to the extreme; its electric-only range is considerable, it can generally handle commute duties using only the electricity that it got off of the grid, but it can also go cross-country because it is still based around a gasoline engine that will drive the car when the grid-provided battery juice is gone.

Electric cars are what you describe--the sole source of energy for those cars is from the electric grid.

The numbers I've seen is around the equivalent of $2/gal gasoline.

It's easy to calculate--you use the same method that you used to tell him buying a hybrid car is bollocks. It's just a cost per mile, and anyone can look at his electric bill and know how much electricity costs the same way he can look at the sign and know how much gasoline costs.

I have a 2003 Avalon with 39,000 miles on it, so you can see I don't drive much, and don't concern myself with gas prices.

I have few expenses and can afford a new car; one of my few luxuries.

I'm thinking of a 2014 Avalon, Hybrid vs Non-Hybrid. I would really like a Hybrid, but I think they cost about 5,000 more.

marc

I slobber over the new Avalon Hybrid.

I took a test drive; I saw an indicated 47mpg over my 8 mile mixed loop. So I believe the 40mpg sticker.

40mpg on a pure-dee luxury car. Damn. I have to say, after 6 years of Prius driving I can't see going back down to 24mpg for any reason--and if I can move seriously upmarket and keep the low gasoline usage and low cost per mile, that's highly attractive.

I *have* been looking at autotrader.com and have found some very nice already used Avalon Hybrids for sale around the country. To save the hybrid difference but still have the factory warranty, I'll happily give up the first 10K on the odometer.

That's certainly true, but one needs to know how many miles per kilowatt hour you can go, and I do not know this information. Electricity is billed by the kilowatt hour, but without knowing that 5 kilowatt hours takes you a mile or 25 miles, it is impossible to know what the cost per mile is.

My kilowatt hours are billed in Tiers -- the first few are at $0.10, then I go to the next tier and the billing goes to $0.125, then to another higher rate, I eventually get to the highest tier where the billing rate is about $0.35. I get to the highest tier at about the 16th day of the month, so half of my billing period is at the highest rate. I have to assume that an electric hybrid car would put someone in the highest tier even earlier in the billing cycle. I assume there are utility companies that do not bill on a tier basis, but my utility does bill that way.

If one installs a solar farm on the roof of their house, and has it designed to include the energy demands of the car, then the cost per mile would be fixed in the worst case, and might actually be lower than the electricity from the utility. Having said that, I recently had solar installed, and my bill for the system is lower than the cost of the electricity it replaces, but it still costs me about $225 per month. I cannot say that I have enough production to meet the demands of a car or not.

It does not matter what is insane, it only matters that it is more or less accurate. Perhaps some will keep a car longer, but if the time to recover the hybrid premium of a new car is 7 years and one only has an ownership period that is under 5 years, then the premium will never be recovered. If the premium is lower, then the recovery time is shorter. If the cost per mile is better than my example, then the recovery period is shorter. But the mathematics is clear, buying hybrid for the savings is a falicy for most drivers. Sure, there are people that buy cars and drive them for 20 years and put on multiple hundreds of thousands of miles, and these people will realize a significant savings in hybrid vs. gasoline, but the average buyer in America will not recover the premium paid for the hybrid package.

I challenge you to look up what the average ownership period is for most drivers. It is well under 5 years, and I think it is closer to about 3.5 years. I am not advocating that people do this, I am only saying that this is what I think they already do. I am an anomoly, I have a car that was 10 years old when I bought it 10 years ago. You are apparently an anomoly too, but most Americans buy new cars and turn them over in about 4 years. Indeed, many Americans do not buy cars at all, they lease them. This demands they turn the vehicles over after 3 to 4 years.

I'm not saying that hybrid cars are stupid or wasteful or any other negative connotation you might want to assert. I'm only saying that the numbers dictate that one should buy hybrid for reasons other than economics. Hybrids are good, but the cost structure says that environmental concerns should be the primary motivation, not economic concerns.

I don't care that he buys or not. He wants to do something, and I'm merely helping him run the numbers that he thinks are true for his situation.

Having said that, if there is a premium for the hybrid package -- a Civic that is pure gas or a Civic that is hybrid, the hybrid always costs more -- then the numbers work out to the savings in the cost per mile are divided into the premium, this tells you the miles needed to cover the premium. Once you know how many miles one must travel to recover the premium, then one can divide that number by the average number of miles they travel in a year, the result is the number of years it takes to recover the premium.

I think that you may have done good by buying a used car instead of a new one. The hybrid package is fully depriciated by now, and you did not pay the premium that came on the car when it was new. I don't know what a used gasoline Civic equipped the same way as your car would sell for, but surely the hybrid does not still cost thousands more.

I'm not sure that a gasoline Civic would not give close to 40 mpg anyway, so there is still the same comparison of the cost per mile for hybrid vs. gasoline, then divide the difference in the cost per mile into the premium paid to find how many miles must be driven.

If the cost per mile of gasoline is $0.125 and the cost per mile of the hybrid is $0.110, then the difference is $0.015. You divide the premium by $0.015 to find the number of miles it takes to make the premium back in fuel savings. This is simple mathematics that is not subject to debate. You can show that the cost per mile is not $0.125, but I only pull this number out of my ass to illustrate the mathematics.

I'm fairly convinced that a hybrid will cost more over the long haul for someone like me that keeps a car until it's almost rotting away. They cost more initially. The drink less gas, but how much that matters will depend on how much driving you do. When the hybrid gets old and parts start flaking out, it will probably cost so much to repair as to render the vehicle as disposable. More to go wrong and break even when young.

I considered one when I bought the Corolla, but I didn't want any part of it. It was a hybrid Civic for $1000 more than I paid for the Corolla. Too scary after the miles start piling up. It's bad enough with just an aluminum conventional engine. IE: don't let one overheat or it's toast. I don't want to see a replacement battery in my future that costs more than the car is worth. And for the greenies, you have to consider the materials and making of the batteries as far as the big picture.

Myself, I'd rather have a high mpg conventional engine. I get 43 mpg at 65 mph with the cheap easier to fix Corolla. It's not in the 50's, but still not bad.

Irrelevant.

If you're going to have a discussion the foundation of which is what makes financial sense, start with the easiest item that has the biggest impact: never buy a new car, and keep and maintain what you've bought.

Discussing any *other* aspect of it, within the context of what makes financial sense, is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

No doubt there was *some* premium on it for being hybrid, but that was offset by the fact that we know and trust the original owners, and know how they cared for it.

THAT'S something that's worth paying a premium for, and ignoring whether it's a hybrid Civic or a non-hybrid Civic.

It should be easy to figure out. Battery capacity is known, and therefore so is the charge amount needed to take the battery capacity from A to B. That charge amount got you X miles this cycle. Calculate.

One question I would ask up front is, does the home charging station provide the statistics directly? Shoot, these do:

I would hope a home charging station is at *least* as smart.

Sucks. So be conservative and assume the highest tier billing for all electricity placed into the car.

Would be very easy for a pro to calculate.

You are telling people what they should do because it is what you do.

I'm not telling anybody what they should do, and certainly not because I do it or not. If one wants to buy a new car, or lease one, every 3 or 4 years, then who am I to argue? I would not do that, but I have no problem that somebody else might.

The ownership period is not only not irrelevant, it is perhaps the most relevant part of the equation. If one buys a car and pays a premium for a feature that saves money, then does not own the car long enough for the feature to pay for itself, then the ownership period is relevant.

You are bringing in irrelevance by changing the foundation from what somebody wants to do to what you think is a smarter thing to do.

The question is, if there are two of the same make and model cars, a Corolla or Camry or Civic or Accord for example, that are available in gasoline only and hybrid trims, how much more does the hybrid cost?

If the gasoline Corolla costs $17,500 and the hybrid Corolla costs $22,500, then the premium for hybrid is $5,000. I don't know what the cars sell for, but if one is looking at one of these models then he will know what the selling price is, and the difference in the gasoline model and the hybrid model is the number to know.

The next number to know is the cost per mile to drive, specifically the difference in the cost per mile. If you are driving a gasoline car for 1,000 miles for $120, then your cost per mile is $0.12. If the same distance in a hybrid can be covered for $100, then the cost per mile is $0.10. The savings is $0.02.

Divide the premium ($5,000) by the savings per mile ($0.02) and the result is that this example must go 250,000 miles before the savings in per-mile operating costs will cover the price of the premium. I pulled numbers out of my ass to illustrate the math, but if one has the actual numbers and does the same math, the result ought not be very much different than my wild guess.

The point is, you need to know what is saved and how much the package costs that gives the savings. Once you know these two numbers, you can calculate what the period is for the savings to repay the premium. If the period is greater than your expected ownership term, you are not saving anything.

Of course it would. I just don't know the numbers AND when this discussion started, they weren't even part of it.

Not at all.

Start with the fact that people buying new cars are making purely emotional decisions, and are deliberately ignoring a HUGE financial discussion surrounding it.

Now add on the emotional extra of "I'm looking at a hybrid".

Nowhere in there is any concept of financial common sense.

Trying to instill some financial common sense at the "let's look at hybrid vs non-hybrid" level is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

You are telling people to buy a used car because that's what you would buy. Your argument here is a judgement call, your judgement.

You are telling people to buy a used car because that's what you would buy. Your argument here is a judgement call, your judgement.

You are telling people to buy a used car because that's what you would buy. Your argument here is a judgement call, your judgement.

You are telling people to buy a used car because that's what you would buy. Your argument here is a judgement call, your judgement.

Almost no one buys a hybrid believing that the additional initial expense will ever be offset by fuel savings (if they do believe this then they either drive a tremendous number of miles per year, or they are bad at math). At $4/gallon, the break-even mileage of a Prius versus a Corolla is about 175000 miles.

People buy hybrids because they believe that it's a good idea to use less fuel and emit fewer pollutants.

The success of the Prius is largely due to GM. The extremely low quality of the 1978 to 1985 Oldsmobile diesel powered vehicles caused Americans to eschew diesel powered cars. If the U.S. had the same diesel vehicles sold in other countries then we could have far better fuel economy without the need for the complex hybrid systems. Instead, we have the misperception that diesel vehicles are slow and dirty.

A VW Passat TDI gets 43mpg highway. A Camry hybrid gets 39mpg highway. The Camry hybrid is enormously more complex.