How green are hybrid cars?
I hopped into a taxi today while going to between sites at work. It happened to be a Toyota Prius. Being the geek that I am I spent most of the trip watching the little screen to see how often it actually ran off the battery and didn’t use the gasoline engine. I was quite surprised to see that it spent about 80% of it’s time getting energy from the gasoline engine. The only time the engine seemed to be disenageged was when it was stopped or slowing down and the energy flowed back to the battery. Some times it seemed to take energy from both the engine and battery, but most of the it seemed to be running off the gasoline engine.
It was stop and go city driving and I have no idea how it was suposed to work, but it didn’t seem all that efficient to me. In my mind this begs the question, exactly how green are these cars after all?