The other day, I got in an argument with an eminent and highly respected man - and, just to make me feel even more of a jerk, his lovely wife - about cars.
Unfortunately, cars were not his strong suit.
I didn't ask, but I'm perfectly certain that he has never watched Top Gear.
But, like most people who've been driving for a lot longer than I've been alive, he's pretty sure that he knows more about cars than me.
He and his wife own, and adore, a Toyota Prius.
The Prius is very good at exactly one thing. That thing is consuming small amounts of fuel in city traffic.
Hybrid cars are made for city traffic, because they stop their engines when they're sitting still. Every other car keeps its engine running when it's stationary, sucking down fuel at a magnificent zero miles per gallon. Hybrids don't. So, in city traffic, they get something pretty close to their highway fuel economy.
("Litres per 100km", by the way, is the standard Australian measure of fuel economy. It is stupid. It turns people's brains backwards when they try to figure out how far they can go on X litres of fuel, and it's also an inverted metric compared with miles per gallon - more mpg is good, but more l/100km is bad. If we used kilometres per litre, one of which equals 2.35 miles per gallon, I wouldn't have a problem. But we don't, so I'm sticking with the lesser of two evils and using miles per gallon.)
This excellent fuel economy in stop-start traffic, plus the lower pollution contribution of a car that doesn't run its engine when it doesn't need to, makes a hybrid an excellent vehicle for people who do a lot of city driving.
Out on the highway, hybrids still get decent mileage, but not because they're hybrids. They do OK on the highway because they're light (which means aluminium, which contributes to the cars' price), and have excellent aerodynamics, and have low rolling resistance tyres - like when you pump normal tyres up to 60psi, but, you know, safe.
Some hybrids, like Honda's Civic version, even use special low viscosity oil. The Prius doesn't, though.
Hybrids get some assistance from their electric motors on the highway, when overtaking or trying to maintain speed up hills. But that's because they've got weedy little engines (76 whole horsepower at 5000RPM, for the current Prius - I think that's actually beyond the engine's redline) that need that assistance. You can save a lot of fuel if you manage to avoid accelerating up hills, but hybrids can't entirely avoid that unless you let significant speed wash off when travelling uphill.
Unfortunately, my statement of this fact, and my further observation that the choice of informed fuel misers for all-around driving is actually something like a Volkswagen Golf TDI, went down like a lead balloon. My conversational companions were firmly convinced that the only things that sipped fuel slower than their Prius, in any situation, were glorified lawnmowers incapable of comfortable highway driving.
They'd seen it for themselves! They'd driven from Sydney to Melbourne - about 900 kilometres - on eighty Australian dollars worth of petrol!
My observation that I could do that in my dented 1995 Nissan Pulsar - if you can manage 35 miles per gallon on the highway, you're there with a hundred kilometres to spare - was received with disbelief.
(Actually, I think they might have said they went there and back on $80 worth. That'd require a minimum of about 62 miles per gallon, which I don't think any human has every managed to wring out of a Prius on public roads. About 55mpg is the best I've ever seen reported.)
Things really went downhill when I foolishly mentioned that the Prius does not handle well.
Which it doesn't, because it's physically impossible for it to do so. Priuses have a comfortable ride and low rolling resistance tyres, and therefore cannot possibly grip the road very strongly.
Handling is, of course, absolutely one hundred per cent irrelevant to most drivers most of the time, especially if they're driving a car with stability control (which the Prius has). Stability control lets an ordinary driver in a low-grip car successfully cope with unexpected situations which would probably defeat an excellent driver in a high-grip car. It's amazing, it's almost magical, and it's a crime that it's still practically impossible to find in cheap cars.
When push comes to shove, though, a Prius does not have a very large performance envelope, and traction control cannae break the laws o' physics. It is easy for a Prius to run out of traction, and when it does...
...it understeers directly to the scene of the accident.
I did not succeed in explaining this to my conversational partners, who firmly insisted that their Prius had excellent handling.
My working hypothesis is that this is because they do not actually know what handling is, and have confused it with ride comfort.
I freely admit to making a further blunder when they pointed out that their other car also has excellent handling, and volunteered the information that it's another Toyota.
A RAV4.
I couldn't help, at this point, blurting out that this proved that they knew nothing about cars at all.
Which I should not have done.
I shall draw a discreet veil over the rest of the conversation, except to mention that the phrase "we'll agree to disagree" was directed at me.
I have used that phrase myself. When I use it, it means "You're wrong, and stupid, and I would like you to be quiet now". I suspect it might have meant that in this case, too, since when I offered to e-mail the gentleman the evidence, he said he'd rather I didn't.
Anyway. To finish off, here are the three basic classes of very economical car that normal human beings might want to own, while we're waiting for that groovy modular automobile to come along.
1: A Prius.
Great in town. Tolerable on the highway. Bad if you have to steer suddenly to avoid hitting something. New and shiny and nice.
Insofar as there exists such a thing as "an average driver", a Prius is realistically good for a quite remarkable 50-plus miles per gallon overall if you're careful, and 45mpg even if you're not.
You could probably abuse a Prius into delivering only 40mpg if you really tried. Lots of very short trips would do it, if you don't make judicious use of the EV button. But you wouldn't have a lot of fun doing that, which rather defeats the purpose of wasting fuel.
2: A Volkswagen Something-Or-Other TDI.
The 1.9 litre Volkswagen turbo diesel, when mounted in its natural habitat (a Golf), is good for a perfectly realistic 55 miles per gallon. Maybe only 45, if you're a more excitable driver and/or have an older Golf.
You can get at least one and a quarter new diesel Golfs for the price of a new Prius, at least here in Australia.
Like all other diesels, the TDI can run on biodiesel, which gives it more environmentalist bragging points than any petrol Prius will ever have.
3: An old-ish diesel, canonically a Mercedes-Benz 300D in an unattractive colour.
A decent 300D will cost you a tenth as much as a Prius. Its fuel economy and general performance are both quite unexciting - though it wouldn't surprise me if an orange 300D wagon could beat a Prius around a track - and it very conclusively lacks stability control, though you don't have to pay much to get one new enough that it at least has anti-lock brakes.
The Unique Selling Point of cars like the 300D is that you can run them on waste, or even fresh, vegetable oil.
In theory, you can do this with no conversion equipment at all, if you live in a nice warm place like Australia (the oil thickens in cold climates, requiring tank heaters and/or a dual fuel system). In practice, you'll need a new fuel filter and maybe a new hose or three.
But that's all, for a $3000 car (donate the money saved to the dolphin-hugging organisation of your choice), with most modern conveniences, that runs on filtered fry grease.
Thereby putting to shame even the biodiesel crowd, let alone those dinosaur-burning Prius drivers.
Here in Australia, big cans of brand new vegetable oil currently cost, at retail, only about 1.5 times as much per litre as mineral diesel.
A huge plastic tank of filtered waste oil meant for animal feed will probably cost you quite a lot less than mineral diesel, even including delivery by a confused fellow in overalls who can't figure out where you're hiding your cows.