Autoblog

sweet, maryland made the list.

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I lose count of the Priuses at my company's parking lot in Santa Clara. I think the Prius is the in thing for geeks old and young, but generally the latter. It's like the Beetle was the reverse status symbol back in the 60s. Not about saving money, but everything about making a statement in a way that traditional car nuts might have a problem understanding.

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"Not about saving money, but everything about making a statement in a way that traditional car nuts might have a problem understanding."

You're absolutely right! A car nut is an enthusiast, someone who drives for the pleasure of driving, and that pleasure also comes from what they drive.
So what does the Prius excel at?? Is it breaking, acceleration, handling, interior, exterior styling...etc. No, it's gas mileage savings and the technology that achieves it.
Understanding the statement one makes when they purchase a Prius is easy, the problem is when hybrid owner don't understand why most car enthusiasts don't want to drive a Prius.

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Here, Here Corey W. I agree. At this stage in hybrid development, I'm not interested. Now when hydrogen fuels get going, I am on that; because of they seem to be right there with the oil burners as far as performance. I'm not cool with batteries as my primary or secondary power in a car; but having the brake systems and stuff producing energy is cool.

I just can't get over the old civics, corollas and metros that were great with gas; but I felt very unsafe trying to merge on the highway with a 0-60 around 12 seconds. Plus airbags only do so much for safety, nothing beats alittle more area between me and the other car.

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Re Calvin,
I love your statement about trad. car nuts. My brother-in-law THINKS he's a car nut because he reads a few magazines and then runs out and buys whatever car 2 or more mags "gush over". In the '90s he wanted my sister to replace her trusty but somewhat worn 10 year old Escort with a Nissan 200 SX SER. She drove a SX SE (the 1.6 powered model) and fell in love. He was pissed that she wouldn't trade her car in for the one he thought she should buy. At the time she got her car he was driving an Infiniti J30. When it was no longer the car mags darling, it had to go. In 1999 my sister and her husband looked at '98 and '99 Mustangs, eventually she traded her 4 year old 200 SX for a '99 Mustang. (It was, after all, loved by all the buff books.) Now, with high gas prices, my sister's husband is trying to get her to trade her Mustang for a Prius. She wants a car with a stick shift and while she likes the Prius, her last letter makes it sound like she knows she will be giving up a lot of driving enjoyment.
I guess the kicker is, my B-I-L THINKS he's a car nut, but my sister's choices would be the ones that really would be the mark of a car nut.

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They should really rank the list by hybrid registrations as a percentage of each states' total car registrations. Then you'll get a true feel of which state is the most "green". If they ranked this way, I'm pretty sure Texas would be at the bottom of the list...

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I wonder how many of them are actually registered and owned by the state. My job has me working with government agencies and right now the Dept. of Labor in NY has quite a few Civic Hybrids. Taking a walk around Hartford, CT, where I live, there are city lots by my house and I've never seen so many Toyota Prius in my life.

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Corey W., great point. This is what's totally behind a lot of the dissing hybrids get, and it's very valid. They are built putting non-traditional standards first, though reaching to accomodate traditional interests.

Honda and Toyota have both tried to tackle this issue. You can use a hybrid system to save gas or increase performance. T & H have used their hybrid system on some models to pump up the performance rather than increase fuel economy, so that for instance the hybrid Accord has the most hp of any Accord. It's the top of their Accord line for performance. The result? Complaints about its mileage. Hmm. That kinda points to a lot of conflicted or confused attitudes out there. People are ticked at the high-performance hybrid Accord because it's not as fuel-efficient as the Prius or Insight, which aren't designed to be high performance, which is why they aren't good as other cars. Round and round we go.
Remember, too, that some folks aren't car nuts. They want reasonable performance, reliability, low maintenance costs, good mileage, and safety. Boring, I know, but there's a market there. It isn't bad to deliver to that market. It might not be what you want, but it isn't bad.

You have to measure a car by how well it meets its design goals, and by how well those goals meet a consumer need. A car can be massively successful at both, and you and I still might not want it. That doesn't mean it's worthless.

One final point: don't you think it's interesting that the Prius is making "car nuts" out of a lot of people who previously didn't much care about cars? Isn't that a success? Is the title of "car nut" a private preserve for folks who only value high performance using traditional technologies?

Thanks for the chance to comment.

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The figures are not too high but encouraging. However, these are still early days for hybrid cars. 'Texas 9,632 4.8 percent'- I got surprised to see Texas in the third position because this is the place where oil is.

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What would be interesting is to see the percentage of hybrids vs. average gas of price in the state. I'm guessing the higher the fuel price, the more hybrids we're seeing.

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I think it is possible to be a car nut and buy a Prius. That is what has been driving me crazy about the car market for the last decade or so. Every new model had higher horsepower and a bigger engine. If you wanted the model with all the bells and whistles, you had to buy the deluxe model with the big gas-sucking engine.

What if you want the latest technology, but you think a 0-60 time of 10 seconds is adequate? Before hybrids came out, the only way to get decent gas mileage was to buy an economy car. A new choice was added to the market, a loaded car with good gas mileage, and it turns out people will buy it. The constant attacks on hybrids really mystify me.

Some of the enjoyment you get from a Prius is the usual. I scoff when I hear about a car with a touch screen, or radio buttons on the steering wheel, or push button start. That's old news, I've had it for 2 years. Also electric steering, throttle-by-wire and brake-by-wire. The computerization of the car is impressive, and you can buy a device that will monitor the CAN bus inside the prius and give you all sorts of information about what is going on in the car (like instantaneous horsepower, or the position of the gas pedal). Hybrids are cheap exotic concept cars.

There is more pleasure in driving a Prius than you think. It is just different than weaving in and out of traffic, tail-gating in the passing lane, and racing to be the first car to a red light. It's a challenge to read road conditions and figure out how to run the car on pure electricity.

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Interesting, but even more interesting would be this data on a per capita basis. I could not find data on number of cars by state, but the following is a calculation of 2005 hybiid registrations (based on the above Polk data) per capita by state (based on 2004 state population data from the U.S. Census). Yes, the numbers are dismally low. And TX, FL and NY are not as impressive as they first appeared!

CA 0.15%
VA 0.12%
WA 0.11%
MD 0.10%
MA 0.09%
FL 0.06%
IL 0.06%
PA 0.06%
NY 0.05%
TX 0.04%

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These are some unreliable results. Why? You need to compare it to actual census data (http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/tab05.txt) and see how many people live in each of these states. California (#1 in your survey) has 33 million people, where as Washington State (#6) has almost 6 million people.

Here is what happens when you actually compare it to the population in each state.

1. California 52,619 hybrids sold (33,871,648 people), 1 in 643.7 people own a hybrid
2. Florida 10,470 hybrids sold (15,982,378 people), 1 in 1526.5 people own a hybrid
3. Texas 9,632 hybrids sold (20,851,820 people), 1 in 2164.8 people own a hybrid
4. New York 9,372 hybrids sold (18,976,457 people), 1 in 2024.8 people own a hybrid
5. Virginia 8,650 hybrids sold (7,078,515 people), 1 in 818.3 people own a hybrid
6. Illinois 7,286 hybrids sold (12,419,293 people), 1 in 1704.5 people own a hybrid
7. Washington 6,970 hybrids sold (5,894,121 people), 1 in 845.6 people own a hybrid
8. Pennsylvania 6,948 hybrids sold (12,281,054 people), 1 in 1889.9 people own a hybrid
9. Massachusetts 6,060 hybrids sold (6,349,097 people), 1 in 1047.7 people own a hybrid
10. Maryland 5,673 hybrids sold (5,296,486 people), 1 in 933.6 people own a hybrid

Or the new top 10 (with only data available for these 10 states)
1. California
2. Virginia
3. Washington
4. Maryland
5. Massachusetts
6. Florida
7. Illinois
8. Pennsylvania
9. New York
10. Texas

I arrived by these numbers by:
state's population data divided by amount of hybrids sold = the number of hybrid sold per person in each state. [reply]

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Corey W, I think you're reasoning is kind of dissapointing. By all means, drive your hot exotic ride, but don't commute in it. It just doesn't make sense.

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I agree about the numbers being somewhat inaccurate compared to state total...for example, I live in Florida but there really aren't THAT many hybrids. I saw more on my trip to Seattle last year...

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I really don't get everyone's obsession with hybrids. Honestly on a daily driving basis they don't really get any better gas milage than the average small car with a small displacement engine. Though I guess people like them because it makes them feel good that they're being "eco-friendly" and all that.

The major problem in the US is the diesel situation. The mileage of a diesel car completely smashes the hybrid's milage, which is way overinflated by epa testing, to bits. But the diesel we get in the US is awful compared to Europe so most of the cars runing on that fuel don't make it here to America. There's also a huge stigma against diesel here. Hopefully, in 2008, when the US gets decent quality diesel the VW group will bring a lot of their cars over and run an anti-hybrid campaign so that people are weened off the idea that hybrids are so eco friendly.

And, I'm sorry, but you're not a car enthusiast if you only drive a hybrid. Car enthusiasts enjoy motoring and all that goes along with it. Frankly what seperates car enthustiasts from regular drivers is if you can say "forget gas prices I'm going to have a little fun." And that doesn't mean being "bad" and engaging the engine because you want that little bit of extra acceleration on the morning commute. And you can try to drive carefully to improve gas mileage in any car. Just the act of buying a hybrid means you're sacrificng the best car you could get because you want to save a little at the pump.

Honestly if you buy a hybrid you're not a car nut, you're a trendy, eco-nut accountant.

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An interesting observation of mine is that I have noticed that the Stanford University campus seems to have the highest Prius concentration, while Los Gatos has the highest Dumbvee concentration. And why is it that the average SUV owner drives it like they're in a racecar??? Cracks me up to hear on KGO's traffic reports on weekday mornings when they mention SUV rollovers an average of two times in a week!

Meanwhile, averaging 57.4MPG in my 2005 Prius...

-he who stacks pork

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