$132.6 Billion to reduce oil consumption by 5% with Hybrid vehicles?

[JohnWxy]

Lets assume Hybrid vehicles on average improve gas mileage by 25%. IF you want to reduce fossi fuel usage and thereby oil imports by say 5% - how many hybrids will you need on the road to reduce the oil demand by 5%?

Lets assume, for simplicity hybrid vehicles are driven the about the same as the average of all vehicles. If hybrids deliver a 25% reduction in fuel usage, then if ALL the vehicles being driven were Hybrids you would get a 25% reduction in oil demand. to get a 5% reduction in oil demand you then would need one fifth of the cars on the road to be Hybrids - all other things being equal.

No cars & light trucks on the road today (2000) .................................221,000,000 (Federal Highway administration)

Proportion of hybrids to acheive 5% reduction in total demand ........................0.20
Total number of Hybrids needed: ......................................................44,200,000

Tax credit for hybrid vehicles (average): ............................................$3,000
Total cost to acheive 5% reduction in oil demand using hybrid vehicles: .. $132,600,000,000 (anything wrong with my arithmetic?)


You would need 44.2 Million hybrid cars to get the 5% reduction in total demand.
Using the current tax credit of (on the average $3,000 - a guesstimate) it would therefor cost us:

$132.6 BILLION dollars to achieve that 5% reduction solely with hybrid vehicles.

Also, how long will it take to get to 20% of the fleet being hybrids? Not everybody buys a new car every year. Would this take 20 years? Don't forget during the time that you would be trying to get to the 44 million vehicles the older ones are going to be going out of service and will have to be replaced. So the cost would actually be higher than $132 Billion. If it took 20 years to get to 44 million cars, half of the originals would be out of service by then, so to get to 20 million cars in service you might have to buy maybe another 20 million more hybrids. Which would set the cost (if we kept the tax credit in place) 50% higher than $132 billion. OF course, if we don't keep the tax credit in place would the purchase of hybrids keep up at a pace needed to reach 20% of the fleet? And if you don't get to 20% of the total fleet, well you hardly can expect to get the 5% reduction, can you?

I submit that this is far more expensive than producing more ehtanol and selling more FFVs which don't cost any more than a regular exclusively gasoliine burning car. OF course, any car that burns gasoline can use Ethanol 10% and that doesn't even require anybody to buy any new car at all, to achieve reductions of the gasoline demand.

Something to think about. (...or is my arithmetic wrong?) I just wanted to present these numbers to show you what we are getting for your investment.

Now, maybe thinking of shooting for 44 million hybrids is a little outlandish. So lets consider 11 Million hybrids. That would cost (assuming tax credit stays in place) $33 Billion. Still, a hefty number. And what would you get for all those 11 million hybrids - well, you'd get about a 1.25% reduction in oil demand. (What if hybrids increase their fuel efficiency by, say 50% - to 37.5% better than a regular car)? That would get you a 1.875% reduction in oil demand. Still costing $33 Billion (and if the tax credit is not in place the purchaser will have to come up with the whole price themselves).

Now for comparison purposes, ethanol right now, is displacing about 3% of the gasoline in the U.S.
With ethanol you can replace 10% of the gasoline supply and nobody would HAVE TO BUY a new, extra expensive, car. Any car that runs on gasoline can run on Ethanol 10%. For ethanol 85 you can buy a FFV. THere is no tax credit for a FFV BUT IT DOESN'T COST ANY MORE THAN A GASOLINE-ONLY NEW CAR!

And what about Ethanol achieving 10% of the gasoline demand, well -

Ethanol production is growing so fast it just might do that in 3 1/2 years.