I think I'd prefer the hybrid high-performance cars; I actually read something about a month ago about the 24 hours of Nurburgring. Porsche had a hybrid car in the line up, and it was not only keeping up, but staying in front of the other cars, even with a predisposed weight handicap (25 kg). Sadly it didn't finish the race (the engine quit actually, not the electrics) but it proves that hybrids are just as good, if not better, than their gas counterparts. While the hybid technology in high performance cars is still a little bit twitchy, and the gas engine being tried-and-true, I'd still prefer the hybrid sports car.

I still would never ever drive a Prius. I'd sooner walk everywhere then drive that thing, xD

Would you mind posting this on the blog when it becomes published? http://wp.me/p11rUC-3f

Sure thing.

I didn't know if you wanted it posted here or on the blog when it gets published.

It is fine here, just also on the blog at Wordpress would be nice.

Hybrids are a waste of time in my honest opinion. The current hybrids aren't even truly hybrids they are simply an Electric Motor and a Petrol Engine working together which produces horrible results.

These cars use up more emissions to produce than a standard car, producing more CO2 emissions overall in comparison to a standard car.

They still use petrol, its not going to save the oil resources at all which is what they claim to do. They're aren't enough of them around to make any impact on prolonging the use of oil either.

Where do you think most of the electricity comes from to power the car which normally takes over 12 hours to charge... From fossil fuels such as coal, and we think this is saving the environment?

Also not to mention that a standard diesel car will get better MPG (miles per gallon) than a standard hybrid car!

A true hybrid was actually emulated on the popular British show Top Gear when they created their Hammerhead iEagle Thrust (Geoff II) where instead of having a petrol and electric motor together, what they had instead was an electric motor, that was being recharged by a diesel generator (similar to the Electric Diesel trains). This meant that the car only ever needed a tiny amount of Diesel to run, and its fuel efficiency was way higher than a standard diesel car as well. It also meant that they never had to recharge the batteries at the socket neither because the batteries were constantly being recharged.

It could achieve some decent speeds, even with panels flopping everywhere it could do 60mph very quickly, better than most electric cars. And out sped the Prius in a drag race! With more batteries it would go faster, especially since electric motors always produce 100% torque, 100% of the time.

There are some problems with this though, one noise, a generator is very loud but then not much research has been done into produce quieter ones. And two weight, batteries used in cars (believe they are Li-on batteries, similar to laptop batteries) are very heavy, as proven by the Tesler, a £90,000 electric car which was faster than a Lotus Elise round the Top Gear test track but thanks to all those batteries made it extremely heavy.

Another option is the Hydrogen fuel cell car which is cheaper than petrol, and as the most abundant substance in the universe, will never run out. The main problem with that is obtaining it, while it is very common it is almost always attached to something else (H2O, Water) and can be difficult to extract, it is also quite hard to store as it is so light it needs to be compressed a lot to be usable by a car!

Although they do say that a hydrogen fuel cell car could power an entire street of houses on its own without any power. So if the money was put into researching this we could find ourselves with very powerful cars.

Unfortunately though companies just don't want to spend money to research these technologies because they want someone else to spend the money so they can cash in later. The oil companies wont pay for it because they make so much money out of oil, they don't care if its running out as long as they get their mega-profits. And the governments? why promote the use of other fuels or bio-fuels when they already have such high taxes on petrol and diesel? They would lose a massive chunk of revenue that is used to run the country then, the same way they don't want people to stop smoking or drinking.

And with these money grabbing times and with the economic slump nobody is going to fork out until they have to, which unfortunately is the sad truth and those who are concerned just don't have the power or money to help.

Sorry for the wall of text anyway, I thought it would be a good read for you all

Luke, you should be a writer for TCF! That is amazing!

I have my own Wordpress blog which I don't really use anymore lol. Feel free to use this article in the TCF Blog if you want, as long as credit is given

Blog is up, if you want to post this stuff there: http://tcfpodcast.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/are-hybrids-really-more-fuel-efficient-than-gas/