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Who ever said science and engineering don't matter? I never criticized the Prius's science or engineering; I really never made any claim about the Prius. Or the Cruze. The point I made was about saving fuel, not in one car, but across the industry. You want science? How about mathematics? Let's assume the nation's cars average 15000 miles per year. A car making 24 miles per gallon will burn 625 gallons of fuel. Now your Prius gets 50 mpg. The most comparable car is a Yaris (from an economy standpoint ONLY). I'll use EPA numbers rather than real world numbers because they favor the Prius more. In that case, 32 mpg up to 50 is a 56 % improvement. More than half again as good, and it saves 170 gallons of fuel per car per year (300 versus ~470). ~17 million gallons total (about 100k Priuses sold last year). Very impressive.
Now, if you improve the fuel economy of our 24 mpg GM Generic by 25%, it only saves 125 gallons of fuel per car. BUT...GM sold well over 2 million cars last year. That would save 250 MILLION gallons of fuel per year. If the Toyota Prius ran on perpetual motion, 100,000 of them would only save 47 million gallons. Is anything GM has ever made a better piece of engineering than the current Prius? Probably not, but the economy of scale says that E-assist could have a lot bigger impact on worldwide fuel usage than Hybrid Synergy Drive (even including all of the other HSD cars sold) simply because it could be built on a much grander scale. I'm glad you're an engineer and a proud Prius owner, but I was arguing economics while you had engineering blinders on.
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