What is so funny about the Model T? It incorporated advances in metallurgy and manufacturing that even today are respectable.
Instead, think of something really hilarious: Today’s top of the line Mercedes(or pick your own example), employs the same basic architecture and technology: Front engine, rear drive, piston engine. 100 years later and all we have to show for technological advancement is a Model T with fuel injection, air bags, etc. Meanwhile, thermal efficiency has only marginally improved.

The Model T will be continued to be admired, a timeless classic; Mozart as motorcar. The ones who will be laughed at are us.

Actually, Boomer said it was “fraud” to average the cost of gas burned over the entire trip if part of the trip was on battery power.

That’s the bit I’m objecting to. It’s NOT fraud. It’s no more fraudulent than your idea of “cost per mile”. The cost of driving a hybrid (excepting maintenance, etc) is the cost of the GAS, no matter how much coasting or battery cruising you do.

Boomer is so self-righteous that he doesn’t see how transparent and bogus his ideas are. But he does write well. And that’s the really scary part of much of green advocacy.

You misread.

S-h.Boomer was referring to factoring electricity from the grid for plug-in technology.

S/he makes a valid point: there ought to be a reasonable metric applied for meaningful comparisons between different technologies vis a vis energy efficiency. MPG only makes sense if all vehicles use G exclusively.

Certainly if you have a plugin/gas that gets 50 miles on a charge and you have a 35 mile round trip commute including a stop at the grocery on the way home, you aren’t using gas on those days. MPG is meaningless. On the other hand if you travel 200 miles to visit the folks on the farm the last 150 miles each way is gas. But wouldn’t the meaningful metric in this case be a function of travel distance? Of course it would. A distance of 80 miles to the farm vs 200 results in 30 miles each direction of gas vs 150.

Seems to me that the metric for plugin/gas ought to be some sort of sliding scale using electricty cost vs avg trip distance and gas price and so on. Obviously there’s some point at which the KwH charging cost is equivalent to gas; the underlying “understood” premise with plugins appears to be that recharging is ALWAYS cheaper than gas. This may not always be so. Things change. Wean the country from gas and different regulations etc pop up into place that make the cost of electrical just as awful as gas used to be. The government makes money not just on users of gasoline but also those who deliver and sell it. You think they’re just going to give that up? Of course not.

Have fun developing a metric that’s just as simple as MPG is.

And yeah, just in case you missed it, I’m saying that when the smoke clears the avg cost for the avg guy per mile today will be MORE in 2009 dollars 30 years in the future regardless of the technology being used then.

Maybe that’s the proper metric then: cost per mile.

It’s difficult to believe that grown, adult, greenies in America actually think like this. A hybrid doesn’t use ANY grid electricity. It generates and stores its own electricity from gasoline it burns. On a hybrid, it all comes down to miles-per-gallon regardless if it’s running on battery or IC power, so there’s no problem running the battery to zero and finishing your journey with the IC engine. It’s still MPG. There’s no grid power in the equation. God help us if that’s how greenies think through engineering problems!

Why? Because what those of us who aren’t Bill gates can afford is cobalt or neodynium. Cobalt is in Bolivia (lefty government that doesn’t like us) and Zaire (who doesn’t like anybody) and 95% of the world’s neodynium is in China.

Dang. Money going to places…. awww, forget it.

“Second verse, same as the first.”

— Henry VIII by Herman’s Hermits

Using your method, you can run a test on battery only, don’t even bother to start the IC engine, measure zero gallons consumed, divide the finite distance travelled by zero, and get infinite mpg.

Doesn’t anybody study english and mathematics anymore?

Good grief. I’m not sure if the following generation is becoming chronically ignorant, or they’re genetically stupid due to parental addictions gone wild. Doesn’t anybody study physics anymore?

http://gas2.org/2009/02/08/toyota-reports-that-the-plug-in-prius-gets-65-mpg-are-wrong/

Fortunately, Toyota had the integrity to nip that in the bud. I strongly suspect that the 65 mpg claim was based on the run-the-batteries-down-first trick.

But the laws of physics say that regenerative braking makes weight irrelevant. Real regenerative braking systems aren’t 100 percent efficient, and never will be, but they go a long ways toward making the weight issue unimportant. Even in hilly terrain.