This was in last months issue but it's finally up on the web. The Hybrid Payoff They compare Civic vs Civic Hybrid, Camry vs Camry Hybrid and Escape vs Escape Hybrid. They were using a pre-production hybrid Camry and had to guess at the price for comparison. They guessed high.
I guess the article could have been worse. All in all it seems they tried to be fairly even handed. They acknowledged that people buy hybrids for different reasons than just to save money. One quote I would have worded differently was something like "Most people won't buy these for fuel savings alone." I would have changed that slightly to say: "Most people won't buy these for fuel cost savings alone." B/C I would buy it for saving fuel...that is, burning less gas even if the overall cost was higher...that fossil fuel efficiency is important to me. It seems they got pretty reasonable mpg numbers for each vehicle and I like that they even acknowledged the 'fun of driving for fuel economy' and how they actually made a conscious effort to hone their hybrid driving technique by anticipating stops and such. I give them big kudos for that as I have never seen anyone state that they actually did that. I'd still like to see one of these road trip tests done over at least 1500-2000 miles over a week or so with an experienced hybrid driver (not unlike myself!) behind the wheel of one of the test hybrids. All in all I'd call this one of the more fair and balanced analysis I've seen since they Prius came out 3 years ago. It's not perfect and as much as this board likes to slam the press I'm sure there'll be nit-pickers and decenters, but I think this is about as good as we can fairly expect from an automotive magazine.
Ok. So perhaps I'm like a proud parent skimming the class photo for my child, but on which page is there a picture of the Prius?
