How much does the energy cost to make these vs what is saved at this point?
Want to be the first on your block with a $50,000 Toyota Prius?
Head to Hybrids Plus in Boulder, Colo., and leave your Prius with their technicians. Go skiing or something, come back in three or four days with a check for $24,000 and you will have one of the nation’s very few plug-in hybrids that should easily get 100 miles per gallon.
A plug-in is an ordinary hybrid with an electric motor and gasoline engine that has been modified — usually by upgrading its battery pack or adding more batteries — so it can go a lot farther on electric power than it normally does. On Thursday, a study funded by the Natural Resources Defense Council and a power-industry group lined up behind advocates in dubbing plug-ins the car of the future, albeit the distant future.
This part sounds a bit dubious, underhanded, etc — get the other guy to pay for your ‘fill up’:
“There’s a plug mounted in the bumper,” Thesen said. “When I’m on the road and I take the car to a hotel, I drive around the parking lot looking for a Coke machine. When I find one, I park close to it, so I can plug in where the Coke machine is. … Then it takes six to eight hours to charge.”
#29 No mistake, I was being ironic too.
The CO2 & pollution is taking a backseat in this issue.
However if everyone agrees that reducing oil imports is more important, and plug-in hybrids – where it makes the most sense – is the way to – Co2 redux will be a nice benefit.
So the Fed Gov’t just has to make a 3 year plan to fully subsidize a US built hybrid with plug-in. Force Toyota to build in the US it’s hybrid line.
For a country as big as America, ethanol hybrids or bio-diesel hybrids is the way to go. You have the land to farm out the biological harvesting of energy, you have the industrial know how to turn that into fuel too. You just need to get rid of the Oil lobbies… Also transforming that world economy from petro-dollars into something else will hurt…
Can I point out a few little facts?
Batteries are REALLY poisonous.
AFTER they are used up, WHERE are you going to ship the waste?
WHERE does the power come from? the SAMe places that are burning Coal…
Do you know that MOSt plants have never ran at 100%?
That MOSt of the problems are from Infrastructure that was placed up 50+ years ago?
That most of the power is generated by Gov built resources.
The only thing the power company installed was the WIRES to run the power to the cities and homes.
the most of those OLD power plants have NEVEr been upgraded.
That the POWER companies WONT upgrade ANYTHING until its broke..Even if the tech has improved 1000% they WONT replace it for better.