The Hybrid Problem

There’s no doubt that technological improvements will allow us to build vehicles that are substantially more fuel efficient than the ones people drive today. What’s less clear is whether technological improvements will actually be used in this manner. Modern-day engines, for example, are substantially more efficient than the ones that were around 25 years ago. But instead of using that technology to make cars that use less fuel, the main impact has been to make cars that have more powerful engines — even as growing road congestion makes it less possible in practice to drive fast.

One has to worry about this trend continuing in the future. Dave Alpert notes for example that the Cadillac Escalade Hybrid “does a whopping 1 MPG worse in city driving than a regular, non-hybrid Toyota RAV4 SUV.” That, obviously, is not very impressive from a green perspective. But the technology can be used to power low-emission vehicles — the question is whether we’ll have a policy environment that encourages it to be applied that way.