greenwashing of their hybrids

Fuck’s sake. Flashback! People argued with me so hard about the Prius when it first came out, because I (correctly, thank you) pointed out that no matter how “hybrid” you make a car you can’t escape the laws of thermodynamics to ever make it go farther than what can be achieved by the energy contained the gasoline in its gas tank. Period. Obviously the OG Prius was not a plug in hybrid, so there was ultimately no way of adding motive power to it other than burning fuel. Do I need to call in Scotty on this one? Ye cannae defy the laws o’ physics, captain.

But regenerative braking! But synergy drive! But it can drive 12 miles on the electric motor alone! But! But! But!

You can cheat the stats a bit with the specific use case of stop and go city driving and achieve better short-term mileage than an ICE vehicle only because an ICE engine achieves a glorious 0% fuel efficiency at idle. But on average, over distance with sustained driving, it is literally impossible for an OG Prius to achieve better economy than an equivalent traditional compact car that doesn’t have to lug around a fuck-off heavy NiMH battery bank. There is no free lunch. Even if you capture kinetic energy with the regenerative brakes, that energy was initially created by… burning fuel… and the regen process is less than 50% efficient anyway. Energy reused this way will be still eaten by the bearings, road friction, air resistance, and all the rest of it just the same as propulsion gained by burning fuel. And then what? You need to create energy to fill the battery which is done by… burning fuel again. All you’re doing with a hybrid like that is shifting your energy losses into the future to have to pay back later. (Obviously the newer plug-in models aim to rectify this.)

So the 2nd gen Prius (the first version sold in the US) got a combined 46 MPG. Whoopty-do. So could my combustion-only Saturn SL1, which also weighed the thick end of 800 pounds less and didn’t have a battery pack to wear out, and cost half as much. If it were shaped like a Prius (which was quite a bit more aerodynamic than most contemporary cars, and was the actual key to the Prius’ MPG figures) you wouldn’t have even had to drive it very carefully to do so.