Everyone from Cameron Diaz to George W. Bush (now there's a dichotomy for you!) is talking hybrid cars. Are these dual-power gasoline-electrics really economical? Really environmentally sound? Really high-tech? Really fashionable? All of the above? None of the above? Or some combination of the above?
To address these and other related automotive profundities, we assembled three pairs of appropriate machinery and did what we enjoy most: Six of us went for a drive, a thoughtful one along a carefully orchestrated route. What follows here are accounts of our own personal hybrid payoffs from a selection of viewpoints.
The Cars
Details of them all are collected nearby. Here, we need to refine some definitions. We've come to call something a "full" hybrid if its engine/motor combination allows purely electric motoring, typically through disenga gement of the gasoline engine. The Toyota Prius is such a design, as are its Camry sibling and Ford cousin (the technology of which is cross-licensed with Toyota's). In Toyota's Synergy Drive, both gasoline engine and electric motor feed their power to a planetary gearbox. Through appropriate clutching and declutching of this unit, each mode independently can contribute to propulsion of the car.
By contrast, we termed the early Civic Hybrid and original Insight "mild" hybrids, Honda's Integrated Motor Assist functioning in a sense as an electrically-powered flywheel in line with the gasoline powertrain. In particular, traditional mild hybrids have no purely electric mode; think of them as having electrically-boosted gasoline power.
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