Green and Mean

The ad is an example of the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too message surrounding the most recent crop of hybrid gas-electric vehicles, both in their marketing and in popular buzz. This generation includes the Ford Escape small SUV, the Toyota Highlander midsize SUV and its luxury cousin, the Lexus RX 400h, as well as the Honda Accord midsize sedan. They are adaptations of already existing models, not designed as hybrids from the ground up like the Prius. And in each case, the hybrid version carries a price premium of several thousand dollars. Will people be willing to pay up just to be better environmental citizens? To hedge their bets, the carmakers have added an enticement: more power.

In the minds of many people, a "green" car is an underpowered one: getting passed on the highway, sluggish at stoplights. But these hybrids are designed so that the electric motors assisting the gas engine boost both power and fuel efficiency. Toyota claims that the hybrid Highlander and RX 400h equipped with a V-6 plus two or three electric motors (depending on the model) achieve the horsepower and torque equivalent of a V-8 engine while improving fuel efficiency more than 30% over the V-6 engine on the regular model. Honda claims that the Accord hybrid achieves the "world's best" V-6 fuel economy while delivering 15 hp more than its regular model. The Escape hybrid's four-cylinder engine plus electric motors produce more horsepower and torque than the plain four-cylinder version, but it's still less than the V-6 version of the Escape.

To find out if the differences were apparent in day-to-day use, I drove each hybrid model back-to-back with its regular gas version. In all cases, there was a noticeable power boost, particularly on initial takeoff from a stop. This is because the electric motors boost low-end torque. The Accord's power boost was least apparent, but then again, its gains are the smallest on paper, and the regular V-6 engine already provides plenty of power for a car this size. But the gas-powered Highlander and RX have always felt particularly sluggish in initial acceleration, so the lift in that department is quite welcome. The hybrids also had plenty of power for passing at high speeds. Curiously, the additional horsepower of the Toyota and Lexus hybrids doesn't give them greater towing capacity, according to the specs.

However, all this extra power came at the expense of a huge leap in fuel efficiency. In the hybrid Highlander, I averaged about 22 to 24 mpg in mixed highway and city driving, a far cry from the 31 mpg city/27 mpg highway EPA estimates. Though the regular Highlander doesn't give you a constant, real-time readout of your fuel economy, it seemed not all that far off from the hybrid in terms of frequency of fill-ups. Indeed, its EPA estimates of 19 city/25 highway — also probably a bit on the high side, like most EPA estimates — are not far off from the actual mileage I got in the hybrid. My drives in the hybrid Escape and Accord were much shorter, but the fuel savings seemed slightly more noticeable.

To be fair, the mix of highway and city driving was not exactly the same for both versions. Plus, the EPA formula for determining fuel economy is known to distort hybrids' efficiency somewhat; even the Prius's real mileage tends to be less impressive than those mileage numbers printed on the sticker.

But there's another factor in the less-than-stellar mileage from the hybrids: how you drive them. While I was putting the hybrids' extra power to the test, that lead-foot driving style was hurting the fuel economy. In fact, to maximize your mileage in hybrids, you have to learn a specific style of driving that is foreign to most drivers: light, easy acceleration, making the most of coasting, rather than a constant gas-and-brake ping-pong.

In the media, hybrids tend to be portrayed consistently as a green option; arguably, it's become a sort of knee-jerk association. Up until now, it's been mostly accurate. But as hybrid versions of more models come to market, that may not necessarily be the case. Hybrid powertrains can be engineered to maximize fuel economy at one end of the spectrum, or to maximize power at the other. Many of the earliest hybrids have been on the fuel-saving side, but the Accord and Escape move a bit more toward the center, the Highlander and RX even more so. But every hybrid will be slightly different in how this split is managed, leaving it up to the buyer to pay close attention to what he's getting. The have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too promise of the hybrids is somewhat misleading: The particular model you choose and the way you drive it will determine whether you have a more powerful car or a "green" one, but it's still tough to have both at once.

In the end, if you need (or just think you need) a more powerful engine, upgrading to, say, a V-6 with a couple of electric motors still has less environmental impact than jumping to a V-8. You might not see a huge improvement in fuel economy, but at least your mileage won't get worse.