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I'm late to this thread, so forgive me if I'm repeating what someone else has already said.
My question would be: Why no plug in Prius?
As far as diesel/electric hybrids, I drove a bus in Vail that is just that. I don't know the size of the diesel engine, but they were using these buses in the core of "Vail Village" where the top speed was 20MPH. They were starting to experiment more with putting them on outlying routes where they would get up to 45MPH to see if fuel savings were there. I don't know how much fuel they saved. I was just a driver, and they didn't share that information with me, but they were ordering more of the hybrid buses, so that says something because they are more than $300,000 a pop. 'Gotta have some kind of fuel savings to make that worthwhile.
A plug in wouldn't work for a bus because it's in service at least 18 hours a day 7 days a week, so there's not enough charge time. They are large and heavy so they use lead-acid batteries. Biodiesel doesn't work as well here in the mountains because of gelling issues in the low temps. Colorado gets a lot of sunshine, and with the large area on top of the bus, I thinking it would be ideal for placing high output photovoltaic cells, but that might be adding too much complexity and expense to an already expensive vehicle.
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