"One of the dullest drives of my life."

If you're like me (or even if you're not, but have good taste in television), there's one car show on television that you'll always interrupt an SG-1 marathon to watch: Top Gear. Mind you, I'm talking about the proper British programme (see? British) and not the American show on History Channel with the same name but significantly less humorously-accented banter. If you haven't seen it, imagine a cross between a high-quality car commercial and an English comedy routine. Sure, it's all frustratingly expensive autos ("Only fifty thousand quid? Quite affordable,") and they drive on the wrong side of the road, but there's something refreshing about a show that praises ludicrously high-performance vehicles and isn't afraid to bash one that's a well-marketed flop, no matter who the manufacturer is.

One of their favorite targets for criticism, though, is a car that I considered the most revolutionary vehicle of the year when it first came out (back in middle school): the Toyota Prius. Now, there are some major points of contention about the Prius today: that the environmental cost of manufacturing the battery outweighs the added fuel economy, that it produces unsafe levels of electromagnetic radiation in the passenger compartment, and that it's just a status symbol among the environmentally-active (and the celebrities who'd like to look that way). But the main criticism that Top Gear, and especially co-host Jeremy Clarkson, had with the vehicle was more subtle than any of these things: that it simply wasn't a good car.

To be sure, he's looking at it from the rather skewed perspective of a self-proclaimed 'petrol-head'*, but the criticism has merit. The Prius has a top speed of just 112mph and, with both electric motors and 4-cylinder engine running together, can eke out just 134 horsepower. Clearly, this isn't a car for people who drive cars - it's a car for people who commute. Adding in that the Prius takes something like 5 years to pay for itself compared to a comparable gasoline-powered vehicle (though this number is in constant flux - a change of just $1000 in initial cost means driving 16,000 miles{est.} more/less before the hybrid pays itself off), and we see it isn't really even that. What the Prius actually is - and what they'll tell you it is on the Prius forums, if you care to check - is a way for people who always felt slightly guilty about driving to cut down on their carbon emissions.

But is there more to this than feel-good environmentalism? I would like to argue that the main appeal of the Prius (and similar hybrids, not to pick on just Toyota) is that they might be more efficient, but they're still cars. You don't drive them any differently than you would a normal car, and they have all the same features available. That's a big plus: people don't want to change their lifestyle - they just want to feel like they're doing something to help the problem.

Compare that to, say, riding a bike to work. Or even the bus - public transit is far more efficient than individual car commuting. Those would drastically cut the amount of gas burned in the car each year. But they would also force people to change, and that's a scary thing for most to do. Furthermore, I have a tough time imagining the next big thing in celebrity transportation being the bus pass or the bicycle. There's nothing sexy about getting to work sweaty and out of breath, nor in homeless people falling asleep on your shoulder. So a hybrid allows someone to drive more efficiently while still driving an essentially-normal car. Seems fairly reasonable.

There's another thing, though, that makes even this hypothesis less compelling. You'd think, based on the amount of buzz surrounding hybrid automobiles and their 40-50 highway mpg that this was some sort of breakthrough technology. On the contrary, though, this feat has been shockingly commonplace in Europe (and indeed, the rest of the world) for decades. I'm talking, of course, about diesel engines.

Now, if you're American, that term probably conjures images of semi-tractor trailers belching clouds of smoke at a stoplight. The truth is that diesel has been used for years in smaller cars as a higher-efficiency alternative to gasoline. Diesel engines cost somewhat more than gasoline engines (much like hybrids) and have a fuel efficiency in the 40s to 50s (like hybrids). And unlike hybrids, diesels can have almost as good performance as gasoline cars (almost). Yet car manufacturers (mainly Germans: VW, Audi, and Mercedes) have received only a lukewarm reception in their attempts to bring diesel engines to the American driver. Why?

I could try to explain, but I'd mostly end up rephrasing this article from Popular Mechanics on the subject. As described, a major part of it is fuel costs in the USA and our outdated perception of diesels as being grimy pollution-factories on wheels. On the other hand, hybrids were 'new' technology when the Prius came out, and its marketing as a high fuel-efficiency vehicle has stuck with the hybrid ever since. Yet modern diesels stack up very nicely against the current line of hybrids.**

It's easy to bash celebrities for jumping on the hybrid bandwagon, but I think its more a reflection on the American consumer. Stars bought the car because 1) being eco-friendly was the cool thing that year and 2) everyone knows hybrids are eco-friendly. Truth be told, when you're as rich as some of them, you can almost be excused for not doing the research. The one's who should really be blamed are everyone else. Besides, making fun of celebrities' Priuses (Prii?) has been over-done since about 2006, so why bother?

I hadn't meant to go on this long about an automobile trend that was old news before I was out of high school. One of the dangers of research is that its easy to get sidetracked, adding in background details until one section - in this case, the Introduction - has bulged to fill an entire essay. But what I was trying to get at is this: Hybrids, for all their hype, didn't actually change the way people drive. They just made us feel better about it.

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Next time:
I'll look at next year's crop of plug-in electric cars, which I believe will change how we drive, and how we think about driving. Specifically, I'll focus on the all-electric Nissan Leaf and the plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt, and try to figure which is better. I won't try to guess which will be more successful, though - sadly, that's a completely different topic.

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*Perhaps the best example of this perspective is Clarkson's own segment on the Prius, where he 'proves' it to be more inefficient than an average sportscar: He takes the Prius out on the track and has an assistant drive it flat-out for ten laps, himself following in a BMW M3, a car with twice as large an engine and significantly higher performance. After "one of the dullest drives of [Clarkson's] life," he compares the amount of fuel used: 17.2mpg from the Prius, 19.4mpg from the M3. Without putting too much effort into pointing out how this test denies the Prius the ability to use its regenerative braking, charge-while-idling, or various other energy-saving measures, and forces it to go at the engine's least efficient while the M3 drives at its most efficient speeds, we'll note that he still makes a valid point: Trying to drive an efficient car in a fun way is neither fun nor efficient.

**On that subject, there's this article from the Sunday Times. Its hardly what I'd call objective journalism, but at the same time I think it raises a good observation on the relative merits of diesel as a fuel-saving power source.