July 28th 2006.

Recent press report:

"Honda is having second thoughts about hybrid power trains.
CEO Takeo Fukui isn't rushing to fill the automaker's lineup with the high-mileage technology.
While hybrids may have great short term potential, he said that it would be hard to get the technology
into the general acceptance unless production costs are reduced. There has to also exist a good
business equation, and that is hard to justify right now. We'll probably have more than the current Insight,
Accord, and Civic hybrids, he thought, but when that will be remains an open question.
Besides, he added, the hybrid is not the only solution. Honda, Fukui said, is looking at a range of other
options, "including ethanol and diesel."

What bothers me is the way people keep saying that hybrids are "powered by gasoline and electricity".

While technically correct, that's misleading. Electricity is not an energy resource like gasoline and diesel, or coal, or wood,
or charcoal briquettes, or the motion of waves, or the wind, or even the sun, which is ultimately the source of everything.

Electricity is only a means of energy transfer. Hybrids might be powered by gasoline and electricity, but they are
fuelled by gasoline alone.

All the electricity in a hybrid must ultimately come from burning gasoline. How can it not?
To make it go at all, you have to fill it up with gasoline like any other car.

You can't fill the standard hybrid with electricity. And now that some misguided people like Al Gore, who is either very stupid
or dishonestly clever, are pushing plug in hybrids, guess what?

That power, having lost 50% of its efficiency in conversion and transmission, will have to come from coal, oil, or natural gas.

The hybrid camp will now point out that some of the electrical power is from "regenerative braking":
The conversion of the car's kinetic energy in its braking system, through the motor/generator into more charge for the battery.

This sounds like a bonus.

But you don't have to be a rocket scientist to realise that:
 "what goes up, must come down", or,
"for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction".

Electricity can be generated through braking only if the car is moving and, as we have already established,
the hybrid car moves in the first place only by burning gasoline.

No, sorry, but the Prius and its kind are all gasoline cars. The point of the hybrid system - and, in fairness, the one that
Toyota would acknowledge - is that the electric motor and its associated trickery simply improve the efficiency of the internal
combustion engine we know and love. This is a good thing if you like economy or if you're suffering some misplaced guilt
about the consumption of fossil fuels. But you're still using them, and with hybrid cars those supplies will still eventually run out,
just not quite as soon

This is what bothers me about hybrid cars.

Not that they're over-complicated, too heavy, too capital intensive and, in the long run, undoubtedly more difficult and therefore
expensive, to maintain, but that they're helping to propagate totally misguided notions about the way we should use our oil reserves.

The sort of people who champion the hybrid car are those who would say that burning gasoline and diesel is a bad thing, that the
emissions clog up the climate, drown polar bears and give people diseases, that the oil business causes wars, corrupts the
global economy and is at the root of corporate imperialism.

So why, then, are they trying to eke out the worlds' supply of oil?

Maybe the solution is to buy an old straight eight Packard or a Hummer H1, fill it with gasoline and burn the stuff as
quickly as possible.

The sooner we do that, the sooner the latest wave of young engineers and physicists will have no choice but to come up with
something better.