"Pete Blackshaw was so excited about getting a hybrid gasoline-electric car that he had his wife videotape the trip to the Honda dealership to pick up his Civic Hybrid. The enthusiastic owner ordered a customized license plate with "MO MILES" on it, and started a blog about his new hybrid lifestyle.
But after a few months of commuting to his job in Cincinnati, Blackshaw's hybrid euphoria vanished as his car's odometer revealed that the gas mileage he was hoping for was only a pipe dream. Honda's Civic Hybrid is rated by the EPA to get 47 miles per gallon in the city, and 48 mpg on the highway. After nearly 1,000 miles of mostly city driving, Blackshaw was getting 31.4 mpg."
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THIRTY-ONE POINT FOUR!? Look, I used to have a VW diesel pickup truck. It had about half a million miles on it when I bought it for one hundred dollars, put a battery in it and drove it home. Over the next year or so, I drove it approximately 100 miles per day, and one would think I was trying to kill it. The payload was an incredible (for the size of the truck) 1250 pounds, and I regularly exceeded that. My payload was however much scrap iron, or whatever I happened to be hauling, as I could fit in it. It probably weighed less than 3000 pounds empty, but I used it several times to tow vehicles weighing twice that. It would do 80 mph, tops; so on the rare occasion that I was on the highway and not severely overloaded, that's the speed I drove (The statute of limitations is up on all this, alright? And I ain't tellin' what state it was in, so don't ask). Most of the time though, I was on either backroads, some of them dirt, or on city streets. My point? I got 45 miles per gallon. Average. While doing all that stuff. That's what I'm talking about.
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