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Comment by maeon3 | Hacker News Reader

I have a 2012 Honda insight Hybrid for about a year now.

In the Eco mode and normal driving it sustains about 48MPG mostly in city driving. With lots of highway it goes up to 52MPG. It does this with remarkable regenerative braking, running on electricity most of the time, turning off the engine while you are in low energy consumption modes, and only running the engine at target efficiency.

The future of energy in America is Black Gold, aka Petroleum. Imported from various places in the world.

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Future for how long? 10 years? 25? 50? 500?

This song of Oil running out has been playing constantly for the last 30 years. The reason you don't hear the "Peak Oil" song and narrative being played anymore by the propaganda agencies in America is because the globe has not even hit peak oil yet.

Global production of oil fell from a high point in 2005 at 74 mb/d, but has since rebounded setting new records in both 2011 and 2012.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

You and I will have vehicles drinking Petroleum for at least 10 years. At that point there will be slow shifts to other fuel technologies.

One of the reasons the estimates for Peak Oil are off is because oil companies only project the amount of oil they can economically recover. However, because the price of oil continues to go up they start to consider more options economical, such as tar sands. If you read literature on how these companies determine the size of their reserves and how much oil is left that can be extracted economcally, the answer is pretty much consistent at 40 years, but this measure has never been an accurate account of the total amount of oil in the ground, its just a number that makes sense for their business.

It stops when EROEI hits 1:1, though, and it's no longer possible to get a net positive energy result from recovery/refining. The tar sands are already in the 3:1 range. Corn ethanol is even worse, 1.3:1.

In practice, it will stop before that, when the recovery costs exceed the cost of wind/solar. In the meantime, it will continue to be LESS expensive than unsubsidized wind/solar.

I'm not convinced that battery-powered vehicles are a better idea than using that same energy to manufacture fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2.

We could be using gasoline in cars 100 years from now, only the gas is a storage mechanism for nuke/solar.

It's a thermal efficiency problem. Yes, you can theoretically turn atmospheric gasses (CO2 and water) into gasoline, but it requires a LOT more energy to create than you get out of it by burning on the back end.

If there's sufficient surplus solar energy one of these days, it's great. Gasoline is just about the perfect energy source for vehicles, but petroleum is kind of a nasty source for gasoline. Unfortunately, it's the only net energy positive one.

Ah, but it WILL happen. Finite is finite.

How did you choose the insight over a Prius?

The honda insight is much less expensive per driven mile if you are OK with "eco mode" limiting the peppy acceleration. You should try it out at the car dealer, it runs off the electric motor primarily.

MSRP Prius: $23,115 MSRP Insight: $17,810. The eco mode increases the MPG from (41-44) what is stated on the sticker to (48-52) (my real world results), comparable to Prius at far less cost.

http://www.cars.com/go/compare/trimCompare.jsp?acodes=USC20T...

How can the eco mode make that much of a difference? That seems unbelievable.

Any other advice for buying one?

It makes a huge difference because it stops you from using the engine inefficiently. They don't put it that MPG on the sticker because if a car drove like that normally people would not buy it. You step on the gas a little and you only get a little bit of acceleration. But you learn to live with it and you get as good a MPG as the Prius at much lower price. You can stamp on the gas and it overrides the eco mode.

One issue is that the air conditioner shuts off when the engine isn't charging, but I compensate for that by setting the temperature lower than normal so it fluctuates where I want it to be.

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