It is not possible to do this with a specialty product like hybrid.
This is somewhat bogus logic. It implies that if nearly all cars were hybrids, they be the cheapest ones and Hummers would be "speciality".
We can't avoid adotping new things simply because they are not common yet!
I AM NO FAN OF HYBRIDS....just commenting on her logic.
Ture. It's a serious flaw with her piece.
I agree with your point. It seems that hybrids are still expensive because the technology is new. I'm not ready for to go back to 4 cylinders and plastic yet but it seems the time will come when they will be cost effective...just not now. Let the wealthy folk like Al Gore and Tom Friedman keep the market going and reduce the costs. ;-)
Not at all; the more complex something is and the more exotic its parts the more likely it will fail and be very difficult to recycle or dispose.
Hybrids are intrinsically complex and will always be in a state of refinement whereas I have not seen a radical wooden spoon in my lifetime.
Another interesting aspect of this is that the common platform strategy is one big reason why GM is struggling. They are not making cars people want to buy because there's too little varation between them.
I don't think there's much extra cost to dispose of a Prius or Hummer if we just let them sit in junkyards until they rust away, which seems to be the overall fate of most cars.
However, the point of interest seems to be that if a typical car lasts for 300k miles and the Prius is not economically repairable after 100k miles (presumably the lifespan of the battery pack), that is truly not good.
What this means is that there are probably more than a few Priuses that are being sold on terms that will see the payments continue past the economic life of the vehicle. If you finance a Prius over 5 years - and I've seen six year auto financing available! - you could go only 20k miles a year and the car would be statistically dead before the last payment is made.
So much for cheap lease deals, eh?
D
(I just bought a 2000 Mercedes S500 to replace my ancient 1991 420SEL. Drives like a dream, is super-fast but I daresay it would be horrible on the writer's scale since it's very complex and uses many exotic materials to keep weight down. So if you really want to anger the envirowackos this might be your best automotive choice - and it averages a touch under 20mpg to boot, not bad compared to a similar-sized SUV. I'm pretty impressed considering my 420 was about 14mpg on a good day.)