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Still doesn't look very impressive to me (deeper in the article):
The new calculations show that owners of the Toyota (TM) Prius will save $406 and owners of the Honda (HMC) Civic hybrid will save $317 compared with owners of their gas-only counterparts. However, owners of four other hybrids -- the Honda Accord, Ford (F) Escape, Toyota Highlander, and Lexus RX 400h -- will still end up spending $1,883 to $5,508 more over five years and 75,000 miles, Consumer Reports said.

So two of the models save money, and over the course of a 5 year ownerships these cars that cost 5 digits will save you a few hundred bucks. That's just slightly better than break even, and once you throw in time value of money you're moving to zero or a really small (less than $100) loss.

And perhaps that's a fair comment, but wouldn't you say that contributing to cleaner air is probably a good thing if it didn't cost you more, or require a significant loss of performance? Some of the new hybrids are fairly nice cars.

Oh, I agree that the savings are not exactly impressive. Of course, what if you keep the car longer than 5 years? If you're replacing cars every 5 years or less, you obviously don't care a whit about the total cost of ownership. A well maintained car should last 12-15 without much trouble, and during the latter years depreciation costs you next to nothing.

For example, the first 5 years I had my Taurus, the costs looked bad, as depreciation on a Taurus is terrible its first 2 years. The next 5 years have been dirt cheap. Last year it depreciated just $300. It cost less than that to properly maintain.

So what are the savings after 10 years? Depreciation curves aren't linear, so I would suspect the payoff (ESPECIALLY for the Escape, which suffers more in depreciation its first years) would improve.

Of course, we truly don't know the maintenance costs. But since the batteries are lasting 180k miles without problem now, and the current cost of replacement is down to the price of a new transmission, is that a serious concern? I suspect we'll find out that the long term maintenance costs are on par - batteries will come down in price, but last longer than expected (tech is grand), and some of the cost will be made up through lower wear and tear on other components.