It is quite fascinating that the Prius is selling so well being a 4year old model. 37% sales increase is fabulous!!!

Amazing that the Civic hybrid is selling so poorly.  Maybe if Honda gave it some styling cues to set it apart, it might attract attention as an emblem of doing the right thing.

E-Poet:

I'm sure it's been mentioned before, but the biggest problem with Civic Hybrid is the placement of the batteries, between the trunk and the backseats. Because of this, rear seats cannot fold now. The Prius is both a hatchback and has rear folding-seats, which gives it a great advantage in cargo space.

THAT feature alone will draw more buyers than any styling changes Honda can make to the Civic Hybrid.

It's just amazing, four years ago you couldn't find a Prius, much less a hybrid even in far progressive communities like Santa Monica, CA. Today Prius is selling up 37% and a literal host of new hybrids coming to market.

With serial hybrids, garbage > syngas > ethanol under a $1.00, biofuels in the making and the growing awareness of the dangers of fossil fuels - it seems to me mighty good progress. I would love to be downbeat today but somehow just can't scrooge up the misery.

Civic Hybrid makes absolutely no sense. According to

http://www.greenhybrid.com/compare/mileage/honda-civicii.html

it seems to average about 46 mpg and some can push it to as much as 60 mpg. My 10+ year old Civic CX gets about 45 mpg. Sure it is smaller and probably slower but perfect for my commute to work. So I have the option of spending $0 and getting a slightly lower efficiency or spending more than $30K (Canada) for a marginal improvement in efficiency?!?!? Meanwhile other Civic models start below $20K. Not sure how efficient are conventional Civic these days; they can't be very far from the hybrid version.

Prius is not much better, but is bigger, etc.

In any case so long as I can get cheap used old Civics for a fraction of the cost of a hybrid that doesn't *DOUBLE* efficiency of the older Civics I see no point in spending $30K or more. That means the next generation has to be plugin hybrid that gets 80 mpg! Then the value proposition becomes much better and it is easier to justify the price premium.

It is no wonder that GM doesn't report its numbers. I made a deposit in November for a Vue '08 hybrid. In the end of January the dealer could still not say when they would start production. We canceled the order and bought a Prius.

GM has got to do a LOT better than BAS and hybrid Tahoe. A hybrid Malibu comes to mind and I mean a real hybrid, not the 2 MPG extra from the BAS. They lose credibility when they come out with something like that and call it a hybrid. Do they think that it will actually delay buying decisions? The sales figures for Prius show that it is not working.

Ford is suppose to come out this summer with a 2009 Fusion hybrid. Since this is just Mazda 6, Tribute, Escape technology, I do not know what took them so long. GM is just hoping that they can still get in the game. They said hybrids were just a fad 5-6 years ago, now I bet they wish that they had started sooner.

I think that the PNGV program should have ended up with production cars. Honda and Toyota were watching and did it. That shows me how important a change in administration can be. They might not have been diesel hybrids, they might have been gasoline hybrids and got 40 mpg instead of 70 mpg, but at least we would have them.

Looking back, maybe the U.S. automakers should have continued and they would be competing toe to toe with the Japanese in hybrids today. We will never know, because it did not happen. Instead the administration renamed the program Freedom Car and put the emphasis on hydrogen.

I think GM went where the margins were. They do not have to compete in the small car segment, where they do not do well. They can offer the large SUV and truck buyer and alternative, even if it is an expensive one. This could serve to keep the SUV segment alive for a while. People come in to look at the hybrid and end up buying a non-hybrid model.

I dont know where you got that info on a 1970 accord. 70 MPG I don't think so. more like 35

It's such pleasure to find the site which dedicate to HEV so deep. I am doing a homework study on HEV. I wonder if anyone know where to dig out the chronicle data of sales volume each brand of HEV has sold since 2002. For example: how many prius, Saturn Aura, Ford Escape... etc were sold each year worldwide. I can find the stats for US markets. However I cannot find them for global market.

Thanks a lot.

John Lin
2008/3/22

John,

If you aren't able to Google something that already has the worldwide HEV sales figures, you should be able to reconstruct the sales figures from the annual reports of each automaker.

Let us know what you find out. =)

Here a clue about GM's hybrid sales: According to NA Marketing Maven Mark LaNeve, GM sold 577 hybrids [in March]... from an article appropriately titled GM Hybrid Sales Suck. For reference, in the table above GM barely beats Nissan in terms of units sold, and would be stone last in terms of % of vehicles sold. Since GM sold 280,713 vehicles in March, the hybrid would make up all of 0.2%! That's a rounding error, for crying out load!

To put it differently, Toyota sold more than 30 times as many hybrids as GM did.