Hybrid Hummer Promises 100 Miles per Gallon

[Picasso Moon]

We've taken the worst environmental offender on the road and made it greener than a Prius.

Hybrid Hummer Promises 100 Miles per Gallon | Autopia from Wired.com

Enjoy

[zyonuf79]

I will believe it when Consumer Reports sees it.

[TonyPSchaefer]

Nothing overly new there. Companies have been performing conversions for years. This company seems to have decided to start with a Hummer for the publicity of it all.

[dogfriend]

This is why you should never read the comments to any article on Wired, Gizmodo, et al:

Chad and nuncachuk summed it up well. So the Prius is great for the environment? What are you going to do with those caustic Lithium-Ion batteries when they can't hold a charge(which, judging by a laptop's regular usage will be a few years, tops)? Let's not forget the fact that, when you include manufacturing the vehicles, an H2 is more "environmentally conscious" than a prius(those darned wheel chargers and batteries). All for a car I can beat in mileage with a 15 year-old civic.

I award the "Most Ignorant Comment of the Day Award" to the poster I quoted above.

[jayman]

I agree. Any reference to a Hummer being "greener" than a Prius is a crock of s***

[KK6PD]

Of course these test conditions require starting at the top of Donner Pass, ("Donner Party, table for 40"), and stopping at the bottom!!
My 4Runner got such great MPG that the Auto Tracking Software I was using at the time would reject the results, unless you forced it!!!

[chogan2]

Bullsh*** from the get-go. It's not a hybrid, it's a PHEV. Hence the hundred MPG -- for really, really short trips, judging from the battery recharge time of 3 hours.

But even though its a PHEV it's not greener than a Prius, in terms of energy use per mile or C02 released per mile or any such metric. Because its so much bigger than a Prius.

The remainder of the energy to drive it at "100 MPG" comes off the grid. For my PHEV Prius, at the mix of generation used in Virginia USA, I've calculated that electrical miles produce about 70% as much C02 as gas-powered miles. Scale that up for a Hummer -- more than twice the weight, drag coefficient 0.51 -- and I'm guessing the average electrical mile in a Hummer produces about twice as much C02 as a gasoline mile in a stock Prius.

So what we have here is yet another innumerate and uninformed journalist. Who couldn't be bothered to get the term right (PHEV not hybrid). And who believes in magic, or something -- that you can take a heavy, blocky vehicle and somehow turn it greener than a more modestly proportioned car, just because you use electricity to supply part of the energy for it.

Until such time as the grid is carbon-free, it just ain't so.

I tip my hat to the first poster to that article, who called the author out on pretty much the same issue I just described. Actually, reading through the comments, a lot of people said pretty much the same thing.

[judymcfarland]

When I saw the thread title, I figured it was some new breed of hummingbird running on sugar syrup

[patsparks]

I have found that if you hook a mack truck to the back of an electric train you can travel a long way in the mack truck without using any fuel in the truck. So what?

[David Beale]

April fools!!!!