You may not know it yet, but you'll almost certainly have a hybrid in your driveway before long.
With gas prices hitting new records and everyone in a tizzy about global warming, interest in - and demand for - the thrifty gas-electric vehicles is off the chart. Sixty-two percent of people in the market for a new car are considering a hybrid, and some experts predict sales could hit 2 million a year by 2013.
Don't like the looks of the Toyota Prius and find the Honda Civic Hybrid a bit bland? No problem. You'll have 88 other models to choose from by then.
J.D. Power & Associates surveyed more than 4,000 new-car buyers for its annual Alternative Powertrain Study and found 62 percent are considering a hybrid. That's up from 50 percent last year, and Mike Marshall, director of automotive emerging technologies at J.D. Power, says it's the biggest increase he's ever seen. He attributes it to two things.
"Fuel prices and awareness of the technology are driving the train," he told Wired.com. Gas-electric hybrids have entered the mainstream, he says, and people no longer think, "Ooooh.... it's funky technology. Let's let someone else try it."
The survey found people are less enamored with ethanol, with interest in so-called flex-fuel vehicles falling from 47 percent to 43 percent in the past year. Marshall says the food-for-fuel debate (which we're won't wade into here) has consumers less inclined to consider such cars. He says 16 percent of those who discounted them entirely specifically cited concerns about using food crops for fuel and the possible impact on food prices. That's up from 8 percent in 2007.
Consumers also are less inclined to consider clean diesels than in the past, in part because the price of diesel is about 72 cents a gallon higher than regular unleaded. It also doesn't help that diesels can be hard to find.
Marshall says most people are considering hybrids and alt-fuel vehicles because they're sick of paying through the nose for gasoline. The environmental benefits of such vehicles aren't a big concern, so if the price of gas comes down in any meaningful way, he says, so too will interest in the vehicles. But if prices climb, so too will interest in hybrids.
Others say interest will only mount. Newsweek, in a piece that cites unnamed "federal forecasters," says there could be 89 hybrid models on the market by 2013 and annual sales could reach 2 million. That kind of volume would account for 11 percent of the domestic vehicle market, a considerable hike from the 2.5 percent share hybrids have today. These same unnamed feds predict plug-in hybrids could account for half the market by the middle of the century.
A Department and Energy spokeswoman and several plug-in hybrid advocates we contacted had no idea where Newsweek got that data. If anyone knows, please let us know because we'd like to see it.
Photo by Honda.
