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Old 05-12-2012, 03:46 PM   #21 (permalink)
California98Civic
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Join Date: Mar 2011
Location: Coastal Southern California
Posts: 6,299

Black and Green - '98 Honda Civic DX Coupe
Team Honda
90 day: 66.42 mpg (US)

Black and Red - '00 Nashbar Custom built eBike
90 day: 3671.43 mpg (US)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Stan View Post
Down where is says, "One reason is that about 17,000 people purchased electric cars last year, and other data shows that many of those were trading in a hybrid vehicle."
Yeah, I see that now. I was a bit confused by your phrasing for describing trade-ins by using "on" instead of "for". Maybe that's normal usage. But it's not normal to me, so it threw me off a little and left me wondering what you were claiming and whether it was in the article.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Stan View Post
I was making a joke along the lines of, "Yeah, folks are trading their hybrids in on non-hybrids, but NONE of the cars they're trading for are hydrogen powered."
That's clearer. But there's that "on" again.

On ptero's point, though, I don't think that this LA Times article really offers that much comfort to ptero's position. The main causal factor speculated upon for selecting a conventional drivetrain over a hybrid seems to be price, maybe. If that's true, when the Prius subcompact is compared to the newer Civic HF, the price is the same but the fuel economy is far superior for the Prius. There is clearly a market for the hybrids, and there may be for the EVs too. I'd be much more tempted if the prices were lower, especially the Volt.

Sorry to the OP for contributing to this thread's slight topic-drift.

I liked the point earlier that the somewhat extensive code written for the Volt suggests potentials for re-tuning the electronics to get more fuel economy. I'm going to be watching for second hand Volts and to see what sort of community of tuners might eventually sprout-up.

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See my car's mod & maintenance thread and my electric bicycle's thread for ongoing projects. I will rebuild Black and Green over decades as parts die, until it becomes a different car of roughly the same shape and color. My minimum fuel economy goal is 55 mpg while averaging posted speed limits. I generally top 60 mpg. See also my Honda manual transmission specs thread.



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