Word: hybridizations
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...constituency that isn't revved up about the cars is the car dealers. So far, they have little incentive to push hybrids because profit margins are higher on bigger, gas-only vehicles. Honda and Toyota dealers' splashy newspaper ads rarely if ever mention hybrids. Prospective Prius customers complain that since only trained salesmen are permitted to sell them, the untrained ones steer them away from the cars. Would-be Insight customers say they can't even find one to test-drive. "We don't direct people to the hybrid," allowed Honda salesman Neil Perlmutter at a North Hollywood, Calif., dealership...
Warning to all who drive gas guzzlers while fretting about the melting ice cap and the diminished rain forest: Your bluff is called. Finally. Just as the U.S. is grappling with the problem of how to meet its international promise to reduce global warming, the first hybrid gasoline-electric cars are hitting the U.S. market. Though these green machines, a major advance in automobile engineering, are getting off to a slow start, down the road they may yet compete bumper to bumper with gas-only cars...
...seat Insight travels 600 miles on a tiny tank, a boon to the greenhouse-gassed planet. Toyota's Prius, a sleek five-seater, gets 52 m.p.g. in city driving and is up to 90% cleaner than the average car. U.S. carmakers, reluctant latecomers, have been shamed into promising hybrid models. But will these fuel sippers sell to a pollutants-be-damned nation enraptured by showy sport utes...
...magnified by this year's gasoline-price jumps--are offset by the $20,000 cost of either car. That's several thousand dollars more than similar-size conventional models. If proposed federal tax incentives--pushed by an unusual alliance of automakers and environmentalists--ultimately pass, "there could be a hybrid in every garage," says Roland Hwang, a transportation expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council. That is surely a green dream, but rigorous new laws in several states, including California and New York, are forcing manufacturers to sell cleaner cars, setting what is expected to be a national trend...
...fear collisions with gargantuan SUVs. "I'd like to use less gas," says Laura Blalock, a Memphis, Tenn., chemist. "But I can't enjoy saving Mother Earth if I'm worrying about getting squashed like a bug." Customers like Blalock won't have long to wait for heftier hybrids. In 2003, Ford will produce a hybrid version of its Escape sport utility, expected to get 40 m.p.g. By then, Toyota's hybrid minivan, the Estima, will probably have reached the U.S. market, along with a hybrid Honda Civic. Proving that hybrids are not necessarily environmentally virtuous, DaimlerChrysler has announced...