Nobody has anticipated the flurry of new (and expensive) safety requirements that will come after the first electric-vehicle crash that shorts the battery. You can fight a gasoline fire with foam, Purple K or CO2, but if a battery big enough to substitute for a tank of gas gets shorted, all you can do is protect your eyes from the arc and wait for it to burn out. There are engineering solutions to this problem, but they will add to the weight and cost of the battery.

The real Murphy didn’t say it, but it can be derived from Murphy’s Law:
It’s *never* as easy as it looks.

But needless to say, the GERMANS have developed, and most likely will be the first to sell hydrogen cars, like they have their Mercedes fuel cell buses since 2004. So the point is moot.

VW is making a diesel electric hybrid, but for the Euro market only. It gets 70+ mpg.

Furthermore, some visions of plug-in hybrids and the “smart grid” involve using PHEVs to store energy at night and sell it during the day to do peak shaving. This might finally introduce a non-trivial amount of storage capacity to the electric grid, an ability that would be very valuable to grid operators, particularly to smooth out the variations in power output of renewable sources such as wind and solar. In fact, a more in depth evaluation of the total cost of a PHEV should include the economic gains to the consumer of this possibility.

In addition, environmental gains will not just result after the grid gets “cleaner”, it would be very much a reality now. Large fossil plants are far more efficient than small vehicle engines. Centralized plants have hundreds of millions of dollars of air scrubbing technology that are not available on consumer vehicles. Furthermore, wind energy is typically highest at night when overall demand is lowest, a huge drawback for wind power. Smart metering that encourages people to charge up at night will be very beneficial towards using the large amounts of wind power that are projected to come online in the next decade.

In regards to the electricity costs, you have to remember that plug-in hybrids will mainly be recharging at night. With the advent of smart utility meters (and they are coming, my friends!), there will be incentives from the electric companies to entice consumers to perform the recharging at night since power demands are lower. Power generators (gas, hydro, coal & oil) won’t have to waste away electricity that they cannot sell. After all, until they perfect the superconductor coils to store electricity with almost no loss, there currently is no method to store the power they generate at off-peak hours.

For me, I drive a non-hybrid Civic and ride my road bicycle @80-100 miles a week. I can wait until the technology gets a little more mainstream.

I think the point was that for those of us who can afford to pay more to reduce pollution is a fine deal, but those who are seeing plug-ins as a way to save on fuel cost, we have a way to go yet.

My Hybrid Civic has a 13 gallon tank, and I get around 500 miles (plus or minus, depending on the weather) per tank. Maybe Mr. Peters commutes 50 miles each way, but doubtful.

The other big argument is that by plugging in, the hybrid really isn’t helping because that power needs to come from somewhere. This is true, but hopefully as the grid gets away from carbon-based fuels (gas, oil, coal are all bad, despite the commercials) plugging in a car is much cleaner than filling up.

Frankly, I’d much rather live downwind from a nuclear plant than a coal plant any day.

Lastly, if the argument only comes back to money, then the author should ride a bike or take a bus. As with any new technology, it will not be necessarily financially sound until the technology matures.

If the equation is financially break even(which I’ll admit may be true – today), then money is a moot point. That said, the choice is to pollute or not to pollute. I’d rather not, even if it does cost a negligible amount more each year.

“Five bucks per times, say, 15 gallons (the typical capacity of a current-year small car). Ok. That is $75 for a full tank. Assume a tank lasts one week. That means a monthly fuel bill of $300 — or about $3,600 annually. Let’s round it off to $4,000 per year. That means (roughly) you’d need to drive the Volt for about three years before reaching the “break even” point relative to a new Prius.”

I would hope that a Volt would not require a full 15 gallons of gas every week, being that it is a mostly electric engine. Have I missed something?