Buy a Hybrid? I’ll pass… (Part I)

July 7th, 2006 by Anil | Posted in General |

It seems every manufacturer right now is making an attempt at getting some of the “hybrid” market share. Honda, Toyota, and Lexus seem to be leading the pack by offering most of the hybrid models on the market.

But are they really helping us?

Let’s do some math. WAIT WAIT! I meant, I’ll do some math, you enjoy the post.

I’m going to compare a base model and a hybrid model of the same vehicle equipped with an automatic transmission. For all of these comparisons I’m going to use an estimated price of $3/gallon of gas. All of the information in the charts I gathered from visiting their respective manufacturer websites.

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Let’s start with the 2006 Honda Civic.

Here’s some information about it:

2006 Honda Civic
Trim	Price (MSRP)	EPA Mileage (city/hwy)
CX	$14,760	30/38
Hybrid	$22,150	49/51

The price difference between the two models is roughly $7,390. Let’s use that figure and figure out how much that equates to in purchasing fuel.

$7,390 / $3/gal = 2,463.33 gallons of gas!

Based on that, let’s take the worst case scenario for our base model Civic CX and use the 30mpg rating.

2,463.33 gallons x 30mi/gal = 73,899.9 miles!

So you would have to drive nearly 74,000 miles before you’d reach the actual cost of purchasing the hybrid model from the start. This does of course not include maintenance costs.

Depending on where you live, 74,000 miles is a lot. Living in L.A. I do tend to drive a lot. But since last year, I’ve been driving less than I used to and I’m probably hovering around 20,000 miles driven per year now. Even still, at 20,000 mi/yr, It would still take me at least 3 years to reach that magic number of 74,000 miles.

This is all based on the low 30 mpg city rating. At 35 mpg the magic number increases to 86,216.55 miles, and at 40 mpg it is 98,533.2 miles! I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the Civic CX.

Now let’s look at the 2006 Toyota Camry. For this car I used the 4 cylinder model for comparison since they also offer a V6 model. Both the hybrid and the base are 4 cylinder vehicles.

Here is some information about it:

2006 Toyota Camry
Trim	Price (MSRP)	EPA Mileage (city/hwy)
CE	$18,270	24/33
Hybrid	$25,900	40/38

The mileage rating puzzled me for the Hybrid Model, for some reason the city driving is higher than the freeway, but that’s what the Toyota spec sheet read. Usually the higher number is on the highway rating.

Again, I’ll do the same math I did above only this time I’ll base it on the low mileage rating of 24mpg for the base model Camry.

Price Difference: $7,630
Gallons of gas $7,630 buys you: 2,543

And the magic number is: 61,032 miles (based on 24 mpg), 71,204 (based on 28 mpg)

Although the mileage numbers aren’t as high as they were for the Civic, they still are pretty high. Granted the Camry is a larger vehicle, this is probably why the mileage rating on the base model isn’t as great as the base model Civic. But nevertheless, the numbers don’t lie. You’d have to do some serious driving in the base models before you’d even begin to reach the price of the hybrid models.

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Now let’s look at this in reverse. Let’s start over, but this time we’ll do the calculations on the ratings for the hybrid vehicles to see how much we’d have to drive the hybrid vehicles before it would equal the extra cost of purchasing them over their base models.

2006 Honda Civic:

Price Difference: $7,390
Gallons of gas $7,390 buys you at $3/gal: 2,463
# of miles to drive to justify the cost of buying the hybrid: 120,687

2007 Toyota Camry:

Price Difference: $7,630
Gallons of gas $7,630 buys you at $3/gal: 2,543
# of miles to drive to justify the cost of buying the hybrid: 101,720

EEEEEK! Now these numbers really pound it into you. In both cases you’d really have to do some serious driving to make it worth your while!

I won’t deny it, the technology behind these hybrid models is really cool and promising, but is it cost effective yet? Not for me.