Fuel Woes? Get instead Compacts And Sedans
How can we afford to keep driving when gasoline prices are incessantly spiking without hints that it would go down anytime soon? Recently, too many people I see are taking hybrid cars - vehicles designed to run on petrol and electricity, as the way out to the fuel prices woes. But truths to tell, right now hybrid cars are the most expensive ways to save on gasoline. Even if gasoline prices will spike to the height of $5 per liter (which I highly doubt it would), getting those hybrids would still be the least economical move to save gasoline.
Supposing you have that massive fuel guzzling SUV that you decide to resell for a neat hybrid car with hopes that you can save on gasoline? The initial cost alone of acquiring that neat hybrid car is more expensive than the fuel cost you'd have spent if you kept your SUV. Right now, it is way cheaper and perhaps more fuel economical if you get instead compacts and sedans, than very costly hybrid cars.
Furthermore, there's also the issue of sticker shock. It has been found out that Fuel Economy Ratings provided by the EPA are overestimated by sometimes more than 30%. People are surprised and disappointed to learn afterwards that they aren't saving on fuel like they were supposed to. And to gall further, some hybrid cars save fuel no better than conventional cars, maybe due to the way people handle the gas pedal a la "floor the pedal, feel peppy". But even then, regardless of the driving style when people are promised they will save more than 10 mpg, they would expect not a whit less.
To date, aside from the very triumphant Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight, many hybrid car designs have entered the world market. And thankfully, a good number of them are hybrid compacts and sedans. Like the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight, hybrid compacts and sedans do well because they are less hefty and since the overall car weight has to compensate the added weight of the electric motor. That's one reason why there are times when these hybrid compacts and sedans seem to garner good results in test than hybrid SUVs, which seem to not save on fuel at all.
If you are keen on saving fuel, diesel compacts and sedans is still the way to go. They best provide mileage per tank of fuel than hybrid cars, whose initial cost is more than enough to negate all those stories of saved money on the consumer's wallets.
