Hybrids Are Hip, But Are They For You?

With today’s high gas prices and concerns about carbon emissions, automobile fuel efficiency has become a hot topic. With the fuel economy benefits hybrids provide, hybrid vehicles have become the trendy car to have, both here in central New York and in image-conscious Hollywood.
For all the benefits hybrids offer, they also come with a price — namely, a higher sticker price, since hybrids have more parts and are more expensive to build than a conventional car. Hybrids may be hip, but are they the right choice for you?

A hybrid car is any vehicle that combines a gasoline (or diesel) engine with an electric motor and batteries. The gas engine charges the batteries and works together with the electric motor to accelerate when needed. A hybrid vehicle therefore still gets its energy from gasoline, but gets better gas mileage due to three innovations:

• When stopped at a red light, the gas engine shuts down instead of idling, and starts back up when you hit the gas.
• The engine runs at a constant, fuel-efficient RPM (except when it is needed to accelerate, or for extended high-speed driving).
• The braking system is composed of generators, which charge up the batteries as you come to a stop.

These innovations are mostly useful during stop-and-go city driving, where traditional cars waste a lot of gas idling, braking and accelerating. In fact, hybrid cars are so well-suited for city driving that they sometimes get better gas mileage in town than they do on the highway. For city driving, a hybrid can save you considerably on gas, but for highway driving, a conventional car is often just as efficient.

To find out whether a hybrid might be right for you, contact us at NYE Automotive Group, or visit our regional showroom in Oneida. We would be happy to answer your questions.