The Hybrid Hoax

With "Green Fever" sweeping across the country, I remain skeptical for a number of reasons. I think we're jumping to conclusions, embracing a "sky is falling" mentality with little balanced scientific data to back anything up. This green movement, which seems to come and go in America like the tides, is becoming more than just scientific or political. It's becoming economic, and that concerns me most.

It's my belief that most companies and organizations aren't green because they care about the environment or the animals; they're in it because it will make them lots of money. What better way for an organization to get funding than to sell some "save the environment" swag? Everyone's buying it because they think that it's going to save the caribous and keep the glaciers chilly. It's all one big economic scam, and it all started with the hybrid car.

An article at NPR.com talks about the fading interest in hybrid cars, which is being linked to a realization by consumers that these cars aren't all they're cracked up to be. When hybrids first went mainstream, mile-per-gallon estimates flew around wildly as people rushed to the dealership to get in on the act. Suddenly, the car companies that environmentalists hated were selling these cars like hot cakes. Almost every car maker designed their own hybrid logo and slapped it on a model of their popular lines. Who cares if the technology in the engine wasn't that great? Who cares that these hybrid cars cost thousands more than normal cars?

The only problem is... they aren't worth it.

Hyrbid cars have long been underperforming what's advertised, and while I think that someday we'll have a great alternative to gasoline engines, it's just not there yet. Toyota makes their Prius, and sells boatloads... but then they begin making the Yaris, which not only looks cooler, but gets better mileage. Over the past few years, car companies have been creating these small class vehicles (like the Yaris, the Aveo, the Fit, etc.) which often get better mileage than the hybrids, and they cost less! If companies are thinking in terms of miles-per-gallon, they are showing the consumer that they can do better still with these economy vehicles, rather than with hybrid technology.

The most startling, and telling, aspect of the NPR article is the very last line: "The U.S. Department of Energy says in the seven years that hybrids have been available here, the total amount of gasoline saved adds up to less than the amount the United States imports every day." You wouldn't know this to be true if you listened to Hollywood environmentalists, who insist that the world is changing with the hybrid and that going "green" is making a difference. America isn't going to stop importing oil, and we don't just use it for cars. Instead, we need to create an economic environment where we have other fuel options, which are a flat-out better deal than oil, to power our cars. Then, the oil we do import can be used for other things, like power and industry, and eventually we might import less.

But just as this "going green" is all about making money for organizations and companies, it should be about money for the average American as well. Living in this supreme capitalist economy, we would be lying if we said money didn't cross our minds from time to time. The average American is much more concerned about paying the bills than saving the environment (which may or may not be going to hell in the first place). If you are going to sell me on alternative fuels, show me how it effects my budget; create cars that get better mileage without sacrificing power; and most importantly, don't tell me what to do.

It's terrible the way the word "hybrid" is thrown around with such carefree abandon. You see it, and you just assume that a car is getting hundreds of miles to the gallon, and working towards a better earth. That's a load of baloney, fed to us by boring people who know how to use PowerPoint. We as consumers shouldn't be settling for this; we deserve better. It's easy to see that the demand for hybrids might be wearing thin, but perhaps that's because people are realizing that they aren't a good buy.