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my guess would be only if there was a lot of start and stop or hills.. as you may know it doesn't take much energy once you get something going. on a side note.. i hate hybrids as well. they actually have a higher "carbon footprint" than a hummer. due to all of the metallics and shipping involved in construction and replacement of the batteries once they lose charge capacity. a gas/electric is not the best combo for a hybrid ether. a diesel/ electric would be the best. similar to almost all of our ships. but as far gas mileage i don't think you would see to big of a difference when towing.
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I used to work at a Toyota Dealership as a Salesman. I had to disprove the 'logic' that hybrids are worse than hummers about 3 times a day.
the study done by a marketing company that claimed the hummer had less impact on the environment than a prius in a life cycle, was not peer - reviewed, but unfortunately widely quoted in the media. the findings of this study have been discredited by studies of the same subject from MIT, Argonne National Library, and Carnegie Mellon's Lifecycle Assessment Group.
the biggest flaw in the CNW marketing study, is bogus facts and figures. it suggests that in a hummer's life expectancy, it will see 379,000 miles over 35 years, while a prius will only ever see 109,000 miles in 12 years. using those figures, of course the prius is going to look bad both financially and ecologically. fact is, prius could run for a million miles - I've seen high mile hybrids with only regular maintenance. yes, the
battery does only have a life span of 12 years, but it is neither expensive nor is it worse for the environment to replace it, considering every hybrid
battery changed by toyota is recycled, and about 95% of the hard materials (the outside of the
battery, connectors, screws, etc.) are re-used. To date, the dealer i worked for has
sold over 1000 hybrids, and hasn't replaced one single battery.
"hybrid batteries use lots of nickel, and the mining for that nickel is bad"
yes this is true, but this is not the only thing nickel is used for. Prius batteries, which contain 32 pounds of nickel each, require only a fraction of the world's supply. More than 94 percent of the 1.55 million tons of nickel mined each year is used for stainless steel, alloys, and electroplating. So the batteries for the one million hybrids toyota has produced so far have required only one percent of the world's annual nickel-mining production. Since the estimates on nickel recycling indicate about 80 percent is being reused, a million Priuses' share of newly mined nickel would really only be about two-tenths of one percent.
sorry for the rant, but that belief of the hummer vs. the prius is media hype that people take as fact and truth.