Is a Hybrid in Your Future?

Many drivers now considering a hybrid vehicle have a primal motivation: to survive those $50 to $80 assaults at the gas pump. Your fight-or-flight instincts may be leaning permanently toward fighting as those high gas prices raise your ire, flatten your wallet and prompt you to do something, anything, to solve the problem. Hybrids seem a reasonable answer.

How much could you save just by owning a hybrid? Use our yearly fuel cost calculator to find out.

Gasoline/electric hybrids combine two disparate powerplants — an internal combustion engine and an efficient electric-drive motor — to bring the best possible efficiencies to a small but growing number of models. They do so seamlessly and in ways that do not require anything extraordinary from a driver. There's no need to plug in a hybrid or calculate how far it can go before batteries must be replenished. In fact, unlike the battery-electric vehicles of the 1990s, there is no plug to be found. Hybrids charge themselves while driving, and range is determined by the amount of gasoline in the tank, just like any other vehicle.

Early models, like the two-seat Honda Insight hatchback and first-generation Toyota Prius sedan, blazed the hybrid trail with amazingly high fuel economy, up to 70 mpg in the case of the Insight. But these smallish vehicles offered quirky designs and largely appealed to techies and early adopters who embraced their unique look and feel. That all changed as later hybrid models have become more mainstream and aim squarely at a broader range of buyers.

For instance, when it emerged as an all new four-door hatchback model in 2004, the second-generation Toyota Prius grew larger, more stylish, more accommodating and more powerful than its predecessor. It also features some of Toyota's best new technology. This model became so popular during the early stages of rising gas prices that an unprecedented backlog of 24,000 orders piled up, causing Toyota to increase production and scramble for components unique to its hybrid model.

Honda took a different strategy and brought hybrid power to its volume models — the Civic and Accord. The recently introduced all-new 2006 Civic Hybrid is better than ever.

2000 Honda Insight Honda's futuristic Insight was the first hybrid available to the general public. Check out other current models in What Are My Choices?

With SUVs being such hot sellers in recent years, it was only natural for manufacturers to apply power to these popular vehicles. Ford responded with the first hybrid-powered SUV, the Escape Hybrid, and followed by bringing its Mercury twin, the Mariner Hybrid, to showrooms a year earlier than planned due to growing hybrid sales. Toyota introduced the Lexus RX 400h, a hybrid variant of its popular RX 330 SUV, with a Toyota Highlander hybrid on its heels.

As if there isn't enough to ponder already, GM expanded the definition of hybrids when it introduced its 2005 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra hybrid variants. Using "mild" hybrid systems that come at an affordable cost but bring with them much more moderate gains in fuel economy than full hybrids, these two pickups have largely gone unappreciated for their modest 10 percent average bump in fuel economy. True, that's not much when compared to the 25 percent to 66 percent gains brought by the full-hybrid system in the Honda Civic. But adding GM's $1,500 hybrid system to a mass-market Silverado or Sierra makes these models the most fuel efficient of all mid- to full-size pickups. That's significant, when you consider the potential this holds in a market where more than 2 million full-size trucks are sold every year in the U.S.

More hybrid models are coming. Already, Toyota has its Camry Hybrid and Lexus GS 450h hybrid sedan in the pipeline. Hybrid variants of the Ford Fusion and Nissan Altima models are in the works. Ford says it will bring hybrid power to half of its vehicles over the next five years. GM, DaimlerChrysler and BMW are jointly working on a full-hybrid system for their vehicles, with GM committed to bringing hybrid power to some of its large-platform models in 2008. A joint effort by Audi, VW and Porsche will surely put hybrid vehicles in these automakers' lineups in the coming years.