Word: hybridize
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...moment, $2-per-gal. gas has sent the sale of hybrids zooming like a roadster. April was Honda's best month for its hybrid Civic (3,341 sold), and that followed a record-setting March. Toyota has a 20,000-order backlog for its critically acclaimed Prius and predicts a 50% sales increase over last year, to 50,000 units. All told, hybrid sales are expected to more than double this year, to 100,000. That's a tiny fraction of the U.S. market for new-vehicle sales, forecast to be around 17 million this year. But it's still...
...General Motors, company executives are once again deflecting charges that the firm is missing out on a hot new market and will have to play catch-up. GM has for years been publicly dismissive of hybrid cars. In January, vice chairman Bob Lutz described hybrids as "an interesting curiosity" and said, "We will make some," but added that they didn't make much sense with gasoline at $1.50 per gal. Gas prices are up 30% since then, but GM officials insist their strategy has not changed. The focus is still on delivering hybrid versions of SUVs and pickups while devoting...
...executives are now playing up their hybrid efforts and racing to retool assembly lines in order to crank out up to 1 million hybrids by 2007. The company delivered a mild-hybrid version of its full-size Chevy Silverado pickup to Miami-Dade County's government fleet last month, and plans to make the vehicles available to consumers this fall. Over the next few weeks, GM says, it will deliver 234 hybrid buses to the city of Seattle. GM executive Larry Burns claims that those buses will provide the fuel savings of 8,000 hybrid cars on the road...
Automakers have strong incentives not to ramp up hybrid production too quickly. Hybrids are technologically complex and costly and require the retraining of service technicians. Toyota and Honda insist they make money from each sale, but those profits are meager compared with what they earn from conventional cars and light trucks, especially their luxury brands. The Big Three--Ford, GM and Chrysler--are even more reliant on SUVs and big pickups for profits, and if hybrids eat into sales of conventional models, the industry would be maiming a critical cash cow. So while auto executives talk of a greener future...
...Hybrids have plenty of detractors. Critics point out that after paying the extra cash for one, say a $2,500 premium for a hybrid Civic, it will take about a decade to recoup that amount at the pump (at 15,000 miles a year and with gas at $2 per gal.). They claim that if fuel economy becomes an even more important consideration, there are already plenty of fuel-efficient cars and smaller SUVs that are less complex and easier to fix than hybrids...