Sales of hybrid vehicles reached an all-time high market share of 2.79% in 2009 before falling to just 2.11% of all light duty vehicles sales last year. Based on that less than stellar market penetration would you consider this statement reasonable?
"Given America's insatiable, if not illogical, thirst for hybrids,"
Considering that aside from the Prius, no other hybrid vehicle has ever sold out its production capacity, insatiable is not the word I would use there.
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Hybrid cars are a niche market and their price is currently hindering adoption but once the components become cheaper and it drives the overall cost down, I am sure more people will purchase Hybrid cars
It is my understanding that cars like the Volt suffered low sales because of low battery production. They did sell out. So by virtue of having higher demand than supply, a person could reasonably use insatiable in that sentence–given the literal definition is "incapable of being satisfied."
There are too many people out there writting about EVs and hybrids who don't have the slightest clue what they are talking about. I don't mean +Sam Abuelsamid, of course.
+Nathan Brown while Volt supplies were limited in the first half of the year by the end of 2011 supplies were no longer the limiting factor.
However to clarify what I was getting at, I meant the overall market demand for hybrids. Any all-new model like the Volt is going to have some supply constraints at launch, but once production has ramped up that tends to go away. In general any hybrid model that has been on the market for six months or more is generally available in numbers greater than demand. About the closest anyone has come to selling out aside from the Prius is Ford with the Escape and Fusion but even sales of those have cooled. Honda's hybrids and all of Toyota's non-Prius hybrids sell in much smaller numbers.
+Robert Moffitt I bow my head humbly đŸ™‚
+Sam Abuelsamid I'm right there with you. I just don't see much demand as a whole to justify the gobs of praise they're getting.
+Nathan Brown I have nothing against hybrids in general or PHEVs, ER-EVs or BEVs for that matter. They all have their place in the transportation landscape.
While my original post was meant as a criticism of some dubious writing that I found elsewhere, it's equally if not more important to say that there is no silver bullet to solve our transportation and energy use issues. I've been ranting about the end of the petroleum monoculture for years and I believe that's a really good thing.
http://green.autoblog.com/2006/12/28/our-future-does-not-include-an-energy-monoculture/
Monocultures are almost inevitably bound to collapse eventually and we shouldn't go from one to another. Let's use all the tools at our disposal.
Somewhere in Tennessee a budding writer is silently weeping.
There are so many potential variances possible of internal combustion / electrical propulsion and the media / regulators want to lump it all in one nice hybrid category. The reality is that as the technology grows and further penetrates the automotive industry it won't be so easily captured in terms of a percentage sold versus what we common know today as a conventional vehicle. More and more cars have electrical coolant pumps, power steering and even oil pumps. Is start stop even still categorized as hybrid? I don't know anymore…