[pekwah1]

Hi guys,

Well i'm possibly gonna p**s a lot of people off on this post, but here goes...! Bear in mind though that this is just my opinion and i'm sure there will be lots of good arguments against (or so i'm hoping).

Anyway, it just seems to me that this whole hybrid lark is a bit of a waste of time where the effort could be much better used. The whole idea is about saving the environent etc etc, but i still don't see the point of the hybrid engine. The co2 emissions are impressive, but not that groundbreaking, and then there's the mpg. The company i work for has a fleet of civics, some diesel, some hybrid for the london engineers. The common thing i hear off the londoners is that the mpg they are achieving is very poor, less than 40mpg most of the time.

Now i drive the diesel which i seem to be getting a comfortable 50mpg from, and i don't even drive that light footed.

Anyway i digress...

So as i see, you get a slightly better co2 emissions rating, worse fuel economy, and then there's the production / recycling costs. To produce one of these hybrid cars is a pricey task and it's only because the government subsidise it that it is affordable, otherwise we would be paying around £28k-£29k for the car! The electric motor and battery obviously add extra weight, and steal valuable space from the car. Extra weight again = worse economy. Then we come to disposing of the car once it has expired. The main problem here is the battery which are very difficult to despose of. Luckily, a lot of manufacturers offer to recycle these for us (i'm not sure about honda).

Anyway, the point i'm trying to make is that for all this effort and cost, i don't think that there is a huge benefit from these hybrid cars. I think that the manufacturers' efforts could be much better placed into fuel cell research or pure electric motor cars, a good example being tesla who have teamed up with lotus. Although the power stations would have to work harder to produce the electricity to power these cars, the savings in not producing petrol / diesel, servicing etc highly outweighs the electricity cost.

Anyway, that's my essay over, i'm quite interested in getting some response from both sides of the fence.....

Thanks for reading!
Andy