The new Toyota Prius, or similar cars, may be the key for americans in the future! Why? These cars include an electric-gas hybrid engine. It uses an electric motor at low speeds and a small engine at high speeds allowing the car to get up to 60 miles per gallon. Theses are very fuel-efficient cars.
Since the release of this gas miser in North America in the year 2000 sales have been slow due to initial high prices. The savings on gas will still not cover the cost of the more expensive car, but in the near future it will. According to the article gas prices would have to increase to about $3.00 per gallon for people to start buying these types of cars right now.
Toyota is focusing so much on technology right now. It is the new technology that is keeping them in the game and helping them grow as much as they are right now. As prices begin to decrease little by little we will see a lot more of these hybrid engine cars on the roads .
3 comments:
I think the Prius is more of a marketing gimic, and the reason that more people don't see this has to do with implicit versus explicit costs.
The energy to move any object depends on a bunch of factors - primarily distance and weight. Impovements can be made to cars to increase their efficiency, but they are secondary factors that would be swamped by drivers covering less distance in a lighter car.
So ... think about the Prius. The hybrid part is electical. Where does that electical power come from? From a big power plant in a remote location. It just isn't being generated by the car as it goes down the road.
Thus, the big benefit of a Prius is that the explicit costs of transportation (like tailpipe emissions) have been partially exchanged for implicit costs (smokestack emissions in some remote location). This is kind of like saying your body pollutes less because you use bathrooms that are further away than other people do - when you put it that way, it sounds like nonsense. A great deal of the advertising for the Prius is no deeper.
And ... don't forget ... the Prius is small and made out of lightweight materials. This is because the engineers understand the points I've made above.
Dr. Tufte said:
"Thus, the big benefit of a Prius is that the explicit costs of transportation (like tailpipe emissions) have been partially exchanged for implicit costs (smokestack emissions in some remote location)."
I never thought about hybrid cars this way. It makes sense, though, that the pollution will still have to occur. But I still think that hybrid cars are a step in the right direction. After all, it's not just about stopping pollution. It's also about finding alternative ways to power cars as oil prices continue to rise.
A Prius doesn't actually do anything to change how the energy is produced though. Prices do that, with or without Priuses.
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