The Hazy Future of Hybrid Cars

Environmental activists face a difficult question today: How do you react when car companies that have been ignoring you for years finally start doing something you want?

After recovering from shock, those agitating for cleaner and more fuel-efficient cars will probably keep up what they've been doing: Out of more than 17 million cars sold every year, only about 311,000 hybrids have been sold since they were introduced eight years ago.

But hybrids are gaining traction, picking up "mindshare" where they've yet to gain much market share in the industry -- between skyrocketing demand by car buyers and increased production from auto makers, hybrids are quickly becoming the future of the automobile. Nonetheless, while hybrid production increases are a step in the right direction, the big question is whether automakers will use the efficiency gains to save gas, or to add performance. Although the answer seems obvious -- the vast majority of hybrid owners bought the vehicles to conserve gas -- the next few years may see a big shift in how hybrids function.

Signs of the Shift

The initial signs are positive. Hybrid holdout GM is waking up, recently adding BMW to its month-old "catch up with Toyota and Honda" hybrid development alliance. Then last week Ford announced plans to make half its models more fuel efficient within 5 years and ramping up hybrid production (while one of its executives criticized Toyota for supposedly being "predatory" and for hoarding certain key hybrid components).

Laughing in the face of this new competition, hybrid heavyweight Toyota responded by doubling 2006 hybrid sales targets and planning eventually to roll out hybrid engines across all models.

Automakers haven't suddenly become altruistic about preserving the environment, as nice as that would be. Between spiking gas prices and maturing hybrid technology, it has become good business to make efficient cars. According to hybridcars.com editor Bradley Berman, we're on the precipiece of a tipping point about why people are interested in hybrids.

In a phone interview, he said that "the shift is from purchasing a hybrid based on ideology, whether it's foreign oil dependency, global warming or because you're a technology innovator. Nothing is having as big an impact as $3-a-gallon gasoline." Nevertheless, he added, "we're in a time of great change, and nobody knows [what's going to happen] until they put hybrids out into the marketplace."

You can see this uncertainty in the schizophrenic design decisions being made throughout the hybrid market. Covering all its bases, Honda has the ultra-efficient Insight, the "50/50" (city/highway mileage) Civic hybrid, and the new Accord hybrid, which has sacrificed increased fuel efficiency for the sake of more power.

Again, Toyota stands out. The company's CEO eventually wants to sell 1 million hybrids globally a year by early next decade, but how Toyota does this will be important. Following up on the unexpected success of the gas-sipping Prius, Lexus recently released the RX 400h luxury SUV hybrid, touting it online as possessing "exceptional power -- not just for a hybrid vehicle, but for an SUV as well." Lexus is not marketing its fuel efficiency, even though the estimated 31 mpg in the city is a big improvement over the estimated 17 mpg of its gas-only twin, the RX 330. The downside is that on the highway it barely bests the 330 by a meager 1-2 mpg.

Representing Toyota at the Sierra Club's 2005 Sierra Summit in early September, Dave Hermance, executive engineer for advanced fuel vehicles at the Toyota Technical Center, recognized that they could have put more emphasis on fuel efficiency, but said that for marketing reasons they chose power.

When you design a hybrid, he explained, "in the overall scheme of things you can reduce [the gas] engine size, you can improve the engine efficiency, or you can leave everything alone [like for the Lexus], and those each have three different impacts on performance and fuel economy. It's kind of like, what do you want for the image of the vehicle? They're basic engineering tradeoffs."