Buy a Hybrid, and Save a Guzzler By DAVID LEONHARDT
SOME of my favorite people drive a Prius. They bought the car, obviously, because they were worried about the planet. But the fringe benefits are pretty nice, too.
Prius drivers can use a carpool lane in some places even when no one else is in the car. No matter where they're driving, they coast down the road in a whisper-quiet hum unlike anything else. Best of all, even if no one likes admitting it, they get to enjoy the cool-kid cachet that comes with being an early adopter of a fad. No other vehicle has had a recurring role on the TV show "Curb Your Enthusiasm."
Now President Bush has taken the hybrid craze to a whole new level. To cure our addiction to oil, he said last week, we must invest in hybrid cars, hydrogen cars, even cars that run on wood chips and grass. Energy technology is having its big moment.
Too bad the benefits of our new cult car have been so exaggerated. [worse is the role of hydrogen cars! -- JD]
Let's start with the obvious advantage of hybrids. When you drive one, you burn less gas than you would in a regular car. A typical driver of a Prius will use about 250 fewer gallons of gasoline each year than somebody would in a Toyota Corolla, which gets 29 miles a gallon. That's doing everyone else a favor because gas use has other costs — like global warming and American troops stationed overseas — that nobody fully pays at the pump.
But the favor is not nearly as big as hybrid owners imagine, for two reasons. First, hybrids have the most overblown mileage ratings in the auto industry. In the government's road tests, which are conducted in a world without much traffic or any air-conditioning, the Prius gets 55 miles to the gallon. Consumer Reports says the car really goes 44 miles on a gallon of gas. When I used one last week — and there is no denying that it's a great car to drive — I got 45 in Manhattan and on local highways.
This is just the beginning of the story. The more time you spend looking at the economics of the hybrids, the less comfortable you get.
The most important reason is a government policy that, amazingly enough, seems almost intended to undercut the benefits of efficient cars. In 1978, Congress set a minimum corporate average fuel economy, known as CAFE, for all carmakers. Today, the minimum average for cars is 27.5 miles a gallon. (For S.U.V.'s and other light trucks, it is 21.6.)
YOU can guess what this means for hybrids. Each one becomes a free pass for its manufacturer to sell a few extra gas guzzlers. For now, this is less true for Toyota's cars, because they're above the mileage requirement. But Toyota's trucks and the American automakers are right near the limits. So every Toyota Highlander hybrid S.U.V. begets a hulking Lexus S.U.V., and every Ford Escape — the hybrid S.U.V. that Kermit the Frog hawked during the Super Bowl — makes room for a Lincoln Navigator, which gets all of 12 miles a gallon. Instead of simply saving gas when you buy a hybrid, you're giving somebody else the right to use it.
The hybrid, then, is just about the perfect example of what's wrong with our energy policy. It's a Band-Aid that does a lot less to help the earth than we like to tell ourselves. When Vice President Dick Cheney dismissed conservation as "a sign of personal virtue" a few years back, a lot of environmentalists were disgusted. But that, sadly, is what a lot of well-meaning hybrid owners are driving: an expensive symbol that they're worried about our planet, rather than a true solution.
You can consider yourself a conservationist and still see the logic in this. As Jon Coifman, the media director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, says, "We're not going to kick our oil addiction with good will and personal virtue. You do need market signals, and you do need rules. And you need virtue. You need it all."
The simplest idea in economics, I think, is that people respond to the incentives they are given. It's why market economies have done so well. So if we have decided that we need to use less oil for our own good — which seems to be the case — we need big incentives to change our behavior.
A substantial gas tax would be the simplest, with other taxes being cut to keep down the overall burden. Car buyers could drive whatever they wanted, as long as they were paying the full cost of their gas, and automakers would respond with creative products. If we're not capable of having a serious discussion about new taxes, the second-best option would be lavish incentives for companies to sell a fuel-efficient fleet.
Jonathan Skinner, an economist at Dartmouth, has a nice way of thinking about this. Forget about the 250 gallons of gas that a Prius saves relative to a Corolla. An S.U.V. that gets 16 miles a gallon, like the Cadillac SRX, uses almost 600 fewer gallons annually than an 11-mile-a-gallon Hummer H2, because small differences add up when gas is being burned so quickly. It's the person deciding between those two vehicles who needs some extra incentives.
Instead, the government is giving $3,000 tax credits to hybrid buyers and opening carpool lanes to them. As a result, some people are buying cars they don't need. So get this: Americans are now replacing perfectly good cars, like the Corolla, in the name of conservation.
There is one sign of improvement. The Environmental Protection Agency has announced that it is fixing its fuel-economy ratings. The stickers that appear on the windows of new cars will soon show more realistic mileage numbers.
Unfortunately, the E.P.A. is in charge of only the stickers. The Department of Transportation makes the fuel-economy rules — the ones that actually matter — and it's not planning any changes. It will proceed with the fiction that the Prius gets 55 miles to the gallon. This is our energy policy.
E-mail: leonhardt at nytimes.com.
-- Jim Devine Bust Big Brother Bush!