The False Economy of Hybrid Cars

Ever wonder why these things haven't caught on better? Why everyone isn't jumping off the couch and running to the dealership to buy one of these 60 mpg wonders? So did I, so our investigative team took a look.

Taking the Toyota Prius as a good base model, we found that this car gets about 60 mpg on the highway. According to the sources we found, it averages about 55 mpg between city and highway with reasonable driving. Pretty impressive. After tax title and tags, you are looking to spend about $30,000 dollars on one of these little boogers, financed over 5 years at 3.5%, the vehicle will ultimately cost you $32,745; that is the total cost we will use for our calculations...

So, at what increased fuel economy will this car pay for itself in savings at the pump?

As a base of comparison, let's use our family Ford Excursion. For the sake of this argument, let us factor out the cost of the Excursion. We are testing whether it pays to buy a hybrid purely for fuel efficiency, so we will not weigh it against the price of an existing vehicle. We are purely seeing how long it will take to pay for itself. This is the ideal comparison as you don't get much further on the other end of the fuel economy spectrum. The "Beast", as we call it, factors in at about 13 mpg. Considering the 8,000 lb truck, this is not too bad.

Using $2 for a gallon of gas, we subtract the fuel efficiencies (55 mpg -13 mpg) to get the difference in economy, 42 mpg.

Now, we take that 42 mpg, the cost of the Prius, and the cost of gas and make a pretty little equation...

($32,745 / $2 gallon) x 42mpg= 687645 miles

My logic here is you will have to buy 16,372.5 gallons of gas to equal the cost of the car. Multiply that by the delta in fuel efficiency and you have to drive the Prius 687,645 miles to pay for itself.
Or to put it in context I would have to make my 40 mile round trip commute 5 days a week for 66 years to come out even.

So, next time you want to jump on something that will "save" you money by spending money, let us know and we will crunch the numbers.