Overhaulin'

If you buy an hybrid car how long in operation before you are environment neutral?

With the new metal and plastics, considering energy and manpower resources.

Public Comments

1. I know that you have to drive them over 200,000 miles before you save enough money in fuel to pay for the hybrid option.
2. Never. The thing will rust and return to the environment before the balance happens mainly because of the batteries that are required.
3. never, because hybrid cars make less CO2 (maybe), not negative CO2. firstly, it was always said half a cars CO2 is produced in manufacture, now although they have new cleaner methods of building cars, a hybrid is worse for the environment than most others, cos their masses of batteries are really bad for the environment, and they dont last that long. to be good to the environment you need to drive a car with low fuel consumption, and then keep it for ages. generally this is not done because cars depreciate so quickly it makes more financial sense to buy a slightly newer car and get a few more yrs out of that than fixing an old one, but if we looked at it from an environmental point of view we would fix and upgrade cars. i read that a toyota prius lasts about 100,000 miles, and the batteries die long before then, given that most cars will easily do 100,000 miles anyway, many more, then a prius is worse than a car which just gives off less CO2 and continuse to do so, whereas the prius will stop being as fuel efficent when the batteries die, or they have to be replaced (unlikely due to cost) which is more bad news for the environment. if you want to be environent neutral then plant lots of trees and drive as efficient car as you can afford, and keep it until basically it needs major work done and you can then replace it with an even more efficient car, which they will be in the future.
4. you can't it still burns gasoline.