Heather Peters (no relation to this writer) is hopping mad at
Honda. She says her ‘06 hybrid Civic’s actual mileage more than
just varied: About 30 MPG vs. the EPA (and Honda)
advertised 50 MPG. So she’s going after Honda in court — small
claims court — for $10,000. Which is the maximum payday she can
get there. Honda is concerned because if Peters wins, other hybrid
owners may use the same tactic — and $10,000 times all the
potentially unhappy Civic hybrid owners out there, of which there
are hundreds of thousands, could add up to a lot more than $10,000
in no time at all.
Peters, a lawyer, estimates it could potentially add up to
as much as $2 billion.
“I would not be surprised if she won,” Richard Cupp Jr., a
product liability law professor at Pepperdine University,
told the Associated Press. “The judge will have a lot of
discretion and the evidentiary standards are relaxed in small
claims court.”
So, Honda should be worried. In fact, so should every car
company that’s ever sold a hybrid vehicle — because few, if any of
them, deliver the promised fuel economy.
Often, they deliver much less.
But it’s not really the cars’ fault. Because they
are capable of delivering the advertised mileage.
Theoretically. The problem is that you have to drive them in a way
that, for most people, is not only unrealistic but downright
impossible.
To get a steady 40 MPG (let alone 50 MPG) out of
any hybrid — and I have driven all of them, extensively
— you must keep your speed under 50 MPH and treat the accelerator
as if it were a Fabergé egg. This is enervating if you have any
consideration for your fellow drivers — whose progress you will be
constantly impeding — as well as downright dangerous for
you. Merge lanes become suicide lanes; semis loom large in
the rearview; you can feel the Hate all around you. So, you give it
some pedal — and poof! — there goes your 50 MPG.
There are also hills.
Hybrids work best on a perfectly horizontal plane. Once
rolling, it takes not much power to keep on rolling — and many
hybrids can actually shut down the gas engine side of their hybrid
powertrain entirely as you coast along.
But alas, the world is not — usually — flat.
Where I live, for instance, there are 6-8 percent grades.
These grades pummel the MPG potential of hybrids as they struggle
uphill, burning gas abundantly and also at the same time rapidly
depleting the electricity stored in their battery packs, which in a
hybrid is used to provide a supplemental boost when needed as well
as to allow the car to operate on electricity alone.
And once the batteries are depleted, the car can no longer
shut down its gas engine even when the road is flat once more —
because there’s insufficient reserve power to run the electric
motor. You can almost see the tongue of exhaustion hanging out the
car’s grille.
I had a “state of the art” Chevy Volt recently and this is
exactly what happened. Going up and down the mountain
rapidly sucked the life out of the battery and so I was running
exclusively on the gas engine — which never did better than 35
MPG. This is about 5 MPG worse than several non-hybrid
2012 cars, including the Mazda3 SkyActive and Ford Fiesta — cars
that, it should be noted, cost about half what a new Volt
costs.
GM better lawyer up, too.
Even when you get back to flat land, because the battery
was depleted dealing with hills (or helping to provide adequate
acceleration) the hybrid just becomes a heavier-than-usual (because
of the added weight of the battery pack and electric motor) car
burning gas just like any other car. And usually, more gas
than an otherwise equivalent non-hybrid car — for two
reasons:
1. In a hybrid, the gas engine is usually smaller and less
powerful than the engine in an otherwise equivalent non-hybrid. For
instance, in Peters’ 2006 Civic hybrid, the gas engine is just 1.3
liters and makes only 110 hp. In the non-hybrid Civic, the engine
is 1.8 liters and makes 140 hp. Result? The hybrid’s smaller/weaker
engine has to work harder to deliver comparable forward thrust —
which means it burns more fuel.
2. In a hybrid, the gas engine has two jobs —
powering the drive wheels and powering up the battery pack. There
is no free lunch in physics. If the battery is strained and drained
repeatedly, it puts additional load on the engine — just like any
other accessory. Which — wait for it, now — results in more
fuel being burned.
Honda’s sin — the sin of all car companies hawking
hybrids — was (and still is) not making all this clear to its
customers. Hybrids can indeed return 40 or even 50-plus MPGs. The
problem is finding a place where you can drive them in such a way
as to make that real-world feasible rather than pie-in-the-sky
advertising copy.
