What do hybrids do, or dont do, that make them more environmentally friendly?

Question

What do hybrids do, or dont do, that make them more environmentally friendly?

Answer 1

The only thing they do better is to shut the engine off when you are in stop and go traffic.

For highway driving, you won't notice any difference in mileage than other compacts.

Answer 2

They can run on electric but, that is only clean energy if your house runs on clean energy.

Answer 3

The short answer is, hybrids do nothing but incorporate the concept of recovering inertial energy during braking and using it to help start the car moving again. Besides that, nothing is free. It will take X amount of energy to accomplish work Y. Whether that energy gets into your car chemically by gasoline, or electrically by plugging it into the outlet at night, the energy must come from somewhere. If we all used electric cars charged by nuclear powerplants, we would be buried in spent nuclear fuel rods rather quickly.

Law of Physics: Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Energy can only be converted from one form to another, and that conversion is NEVER 100% efficient.

Answer 4

when you drive in the city, and you put your brakes on, all the energy you used to speed up the car is wasted.

a hybrid will capture that energy, and charge a battery with it.

then when you start up again, the car will use that energy it saved as you were stopping.

toyota prius seems to have the best system today, by far.

so good, the nissan altima hybrid paid toyota to use it.

an electric motor is used to make the car go.

there is a gasoline engine to run a generator to supply electricity, when you're not starting and stopping.

Answer 5

Not much.  The provide slightly better fuel economy for city driving but the benefits are are outweighed by the outrageous cost and the enviromental impact of the manufacturing process.

Answer 6

what they do is cost more because they have both an electric motor & a gasoline engine plus a complicated generator hooked up to the brakes.

what they dont do is use less fuel than a simple diesel VW beetle that gets 45 to 52 miles per gallon.  whats the point?

most of them would get the same mileage on the low powered gas engine alone if you removed the weight of the batterys & electric propulsion system thats just there to give them quicker acceleration from a stop.

I repeat. why buy a 37 mpg hybrid if you can get a45 mpg conventional car for less money.