the Honda Civic Hybrid is a failure
by fledgling otakubecause it isn’t visually distinctive enough from the non-hybrid version? Odd. My intuition says that the opposite should be true. Go figure.
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December 28th, 2007 at 1:56 am
This seems quite natural if you recall that the primary market for hybrids was the enviro-poseur who spends $35K on a $18K car. The $17k is the cost of moral virtue that the buyer gets to flaunt.
December 28th, 2007 at 9:08 am
Pete, that’s unfair to the eco-crites. Neither the Civic nor the Pius is a $35k car. I was briefly tempted by the Prius during my recent car-hunt, but since I could find a similarly-sized car for ten grand less, I went with that. But few people are as cheap as I am, and the Prius honestly isn’t a 13k car, it’s at worst a 17k car, comparing other vehicles on the road. So you’re basically paying a premium of 6 to 8k, not 15-17k.
Also, until recently, there was a massive tax break down in Maryland which must have made up almost half of the hybrid “surcharge” for purchasers.
Personally, I’m a little put out that I couldn’t hold out until the clean diesels hit the US market, but I wasn’t about to ride shank’s mare for the two-and-a-half years it would take for that event. The Prius owners are going to be horribly upset when they find themselves upstaged by 75 mpg diesel VWs in 2010. But then, I suppose their batteries will be dying on them en masse about then, so it’ll be a good time to be a VW salesman.
December 28th, 2007 at 9:10 am
i dunno, i would buy a hybrid if the excess cost was in the 5k range, and i think theres a lot of people like me out there, esp with gas at $3 and above. dunno what the hybrid cost was for a civic though.