Researching the Best of Green Cars

I’d miss this rugged little car. Bought used, it had served
me well for five years of living in a log cabin and
enjoying the sort of driving experiences on wilderness
roads that many Americans only know from sports utility
vehicle commercials.

But nothing lasts forever. I was ready for a new car. I
wanted a hybrid.

By combining an electric motor with a gasoline engine,
hybrid technology enables cars to get much better gas
mileage than the norm. Although every environmentalist
likes the idea of better fuel economy, hybrids still are
something of a novelty.

In my case, a recent trip to the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge had turned mileage into a personal issue. My
girlfriend and I backpacked and rafted for 18 days through
the refuge. We saw wolves and grizzlies, musk oxen and
caribou migrating by the hundreds. To us, it felt like the
last edge of the North American continent that our modern
civilization hadn’t conquered. On the 19th day, we visited
the Prudhoe Bay oil complex, a military-like network of
drilling pads, pipelines, gravel roads and processing
plants spread across an area the size of Rhode island. If
allowed to extend eastward into the refuge, the oil complex
threatened to destroy the wild beauty of that landscape.

When we returned home, I began looking for best of green cars, a “greener”
replacement for my Sentra. I’d first heard of the hybrid
concept in 1996 as a journalist traveling with a
solar-electric car rally from New York City to Washington,
D.C. The great debate at the rally was whether hybrids
would replace electrics as the green vehicle of choice.

The purists still defended electrics, confident they could
overcome the problem of having to plug in and recharge
their vehicles about every 100 miles. But several veteran advocates persuaded me hybrids would be more practical.
Yes, they’d still have polluting tailpipes, but they’d get
better mileage than vehicles totally dependent on gasoline
and still travel the same distances between fill-ups.
Hybrids actually improve upon the performance of straight
gasoline vehicles because their electric motors provide
more power and acceleration.

When I went shopping for my replacement car, I found two
hybrid choices: the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight.
(After Nixon wrote this article, Honda released its
hybrid Civic model. For more information on current and
future hybrids, see “The Scorecard for Green Cars and Trucks,” page46 in this issue. — MOTHER) For professional critics, the
choice was clear. National Public Radio’s “Car Talk”
brothers raved about the Prius on their website: “It’s a
tree-hugger’s dream that anyone could be happy with,” they
said, unlike the Insight, which “makes too many
compromises.” Consumer Reports found the Prius “a
viable alternative to any small sedan,” while the
“Insight’s ride is stiff, its handling less than nimble,
and its cabin very noisy.”

Through my e-mail network, I found friends who had owned a
Prius for a year. They drove the same mountain roads I did
and shared my environmental sentiments. They loved their
Prius, and that was a strong endorsement. I accepted their
invitation to take the car out for a spin and soon sat in
the lap of luxury.

The hybrid moment came at a stop sign when the gas engine
turned itself off to save a sip of fuel. The Prius idled as
silently as an electric clock. “We haven’t stalled,” my
friend reassured me. “Just press the gas pedal.” The engine
purred again. From there, he directed me to the bottom of
a, steep hill to prove the car was as powerful as any other
sedan. He was right: The Prius shot uphill so fast my foot
never quite reached the floor.

To be a savvy consumer, however, I decided to drive an
Insight for comparison. At the local Honda dealership, I
found one in the lot, still half-wrapped from the factory
with brown paper covering the hood. Unlike the Prius, which
resembled a conventional sedan except for its shortened
hood, the Insight looked futuristic: part sports coupe,
part hatchback and very aerodynamic. Later, I learned the
Insight’s front wheels actually are spread 4 inches wider
than the rear wheels, which helps air flow around the
tapered body. The most striking difference from other cars,
though, was that the rear wheels were largely hidden behind
metal covers that blended in with the body and prevented
wind from catching in the wheel wells. It gave the Insight
a diminutive appearance compared to many vehicles that show
off their big tires as a sign of ruggedness.

To a sedan owner like myself, the Insight looked small. If
this car was basically an aerodynamic cockpit, I couldn’t
afford it. I needed the storage space and the sturdiness of
a conventional car. The hatchback didn’t look promising for
space, and the metal skirt below the bumpers and doors made
the car sit so low that I wondered if it would scrape every
rock on dirt roads.

The Honda salesman invited me to crouch down and compare my
Sentra’s clearance. The Insight wasn’t any lower, he
explained, it just looked that way because of its
aerodynamic body skirt. I had to admit he was right.
Buckled in the driver’s seat, I didn’t find the Insight so
small after all. I did sit lower than I sat in my Sentra,
but I had more leg room.

During the test drive, I spotted the miles-per-gallon
number in liquid crystal green on the instrument display
panel. In the past, I’d met mileage nerds who kept a
notebook in the glove compartment to record fill-ups and
odometer readings in order to calculate mpg for themselves,
but this car does the math for you. So far, the Insight had
gotten 48.1 mpg from the dealer’s lot to the highway
entrance ramp. Noticing my fascination, the salesman had me
push a button that switched the reading from a digital
number to a bar graph that pulsed back and forth, giving
the mpg at that moment. Shifting from second to third gear
on the entrance ramp, I saw my mpg slip to 30, but after
entering traffic and reaching cruising speed, I eased off
the gas and saw it shoot to 150 and stay there. I hadn’t
been so amazed by a machine since the first time I logged
onto the Internet.

Back at the Honda lot, I asked the salesman to open the
hatchback. I needed to be reminded of why I shouldn’t buy
this car. It didn’t have a trunk. It didn’t have a rear
seat. It wouldn’t be practical for my life in a log cabin
in the mountains where the local guys drove pickup trucks.

But the carpeted storage space was roomier than I expected.
And the salesman lifted a lid in the floor to reveal a
sunken storage box as large as a beach cooler. What did I
load in my Nissan Sentra anyway? The truth was, as a
bachelor, I’d probably driven 115,000 miles by myself, and
another 5,000 with my girlfriend. How many times had I
carried a third or fourth passenger? A dozen? Most of the
time, my storage space had been dead weight.

I also compared the specs: The U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency rated the Insight at 61 mpg for city
driving and 68 mpg for highway driving, while it rated the
Prius at 52 mpg urban, 45 mpg highway. (Later, I learned
these EPA figures are inflated by some old-fashioned
assumptions about our driving habits, such as the idea that
we average 48 mph on the highway, which may have been true
in the 70s. Today, the average is closer to 60 mph.)

But the critics loved the Prius. My friends loved the
Prius. I needed to talk with someone who drove an Insight
in the real world. Through my environmental contacts, I
finally found someone: A solar entrepreneur who lived a
mile up a dirt road in Maine. Over the phone, he didn’t
sound impressed by my concerns. “I’ve never put on my
chains,” he said, apparently insulted I would question the
Insight’s handling in snow. As for storage, he and his wife
easily had stowed their gear in the hatchback for a 10-day
vacation that summer. And if I lacked the conviction to
choose the Insight, he certainly hoped I wouldn’t buy a
Prius.

“Why not?” I asked. Who could dislike the Prius? Besides
the oil companies?

“It’s full of compromises,” he said. “It only gets 48 mpg.”
And he proceeded to explain how this sedan had sacrificed
mileage performance for luxury. “Actually,” he continued,
“I’d get better mileage with a diesel car, such as a
Volkswagen Jetta or Golf. Of course, diesels have terrible
tailpipe emissions, but I could easily clean up that
problem by converting the car to run on biodiesel, thereby
cutting my unburned hydrocarbon emissions by 93 percent.”

“Where would I find biodiesel?” I asked. “At my website,”
he answered. Through the wonders of online shopping, I
could order 55-gallon drums of biodiesel, which would be
delivered by truck to my driveway. I can’t say his proposal
didn’t have some appeal. The promise of greater
self-sufficiency often does. I already lived in a log cabin
with my own well for drinking water, my own wood stove for
heat and my own sewage system. Why not tell the oil sheiks
to stuff it?

But the idea of becoming my own filling station had
problems. First, I shared the driveway with my neighbor,
who’d been so nasty the time he found a cord of firewood
dumped for me that I could only imagine his fury at a
permanent row of barrels. Second, I was the sort of
negligent shopper who routinely let my refrigerator sit
empty for a week. With biodiesel, I couldn’t very well
recover from my absent-mindedness by using a local filling
station until my fuel shipment arrived.

So I bought an Insight. And I got lucky by finding a used
one, only 10 months old with 14,700 miles, yet $5,000 less
than the new model I tested. As an owner, I’ve learned a
few more things about this car. For example, the electric
motor isn’t really the secret to its high mileage. Rather,
the Insight is much more aerodynamic and much lighter than
conventional cars because it is constructed with aluminum
body parts (a steel framework within protects passengers).

With only three cylinders, the gasoline engine happens to
be the smallest you can find in a car, yet it’s so
efficient that it produces 20 percent more power (for its
size) than the engines in most new cars. The hybrid’s
engine can afford to be this small because the electric
motor boosts it through weak spots.

I admit it: I’ve become a mileage nerd with my own notebook
in the glove compartment. After 20,000 miles in this past
year, I can report that the Insight’s best fill-up came in
Tennessee after several long, hot days on the interstate
when a tankful finished at 68.3 mpg. Its worst — 54.5
mpg — arrived in November after two weeks of toddling
around town in cold weather. Usually, I get from 58 to 63
mpg, depending on the weather and the amount of highway
driving.

The only person to complain has been my girlfriend. I’ve
overheard her with friends: “What does he say when he walks
in the door? Not, ‘Honey, I’m home!’ No. He says, ‘62.3!”‘
But I know what she really means: “When are you going to
lend me the keys?”

Will Nixon is an essayist and poet who lives in the
Catskill Mountains of New York. You can read more of his
writing online at www.mycabinfever.com.

Build Your Own Hybrid-Electric Car

Gearheads and grease monkeys rejoice: Dave Arthur’s
Hybrid-Electric Car Plan, first published byMOTHER more than 20 years ago, is available again!

Twenty years before Honda and Toyota introduced their
hybrid-electric cars to the public, MOTHER EARTH NEWS was
publishing stories on the need for more fuel-efficient,
less polluting vehicles. (You can read those stories at our
new online archive at http://www.motherearthnews.com.) One article profiled Dave Arthur, who built his own
hybrid-electric car to protest soaring prices at the fuel
pumps.

Arthur’s plans give details on building a hybrid-electric
car using a 1970s-era car or truck. Various mechanical
changes, including a chassis upgrade, rewiring and
differential modifications, are necessary; advanced
mechanical skills are required.

Order Arthur’s plan (Item No. 1764) for $25 by using the
order form on MOTHER’s Bookshelf, page 122 in this issue; or online at http://www.motherearthnews.com.