civicBuying a hybrid car seems to the in thing to do these days. There’s this false notion that buying a hybrid vehicle is a great way to take proactive steps to decrease our dependency on foreign oil and that they’ll save you money in the long run because you use less gasoline. The reality is that you or even you and 1,000 of your neighbors buying a hybrid car won’t decrease our foreign oil dependency by any reasonable amount and the lower price per gallon you pay will never make-up the huge premium you’ll pay for a hybrid car.

Honda is selling their 2008 Honda Civic Sedan for $15,010 MSRP. The hybrid version of that vehicle, the ’08 Civic Hybrid Sedan retails for $22,600. For that extra $7,600 dollars, you’ll get an extra 11 miles per gallon of fuel economy. You might think that going from 34 MPG to 45 MPG would make a big difference, but the reality is that you would only use 72 more gallons of gasoline per year in the non-hybrid. If you were to drive an average of 10,000 miles per year and gasoline was at a fixed price of $3.00 a gallon, you would have to drive your new civic hybrid for a whopping 35 years before the cost would break even!

Out of all of the oil that the United States uses, it imports 58% of it from foreign countries. That’s a whopping 12 million barrels of oil imported each day. You can get around 18 useable gallons of gasoline from each barrel. The rest of that oil is used to create heating oil and other oil based products. That means we’re importing 78.8 billion gallons of gasoline each year. The 72 gallons that you would save a year are a drop in a very large bucket. Even if 1 million Americans chose a hybrid for their next vehicle, it would only decrease foreign oil dependency by less than 1%.

Switching to hybrid cars is not going to do anything particularly amazing to help the environment and won’t even be a drop in the bucket when it comes to reducing foreign oil dependence. Buying one won’t do your pocketbook any favors either. Until the technology develops to a point where the price between a hybrid model and a traditional gasoline engine becomes much lower, purchasing a hybrid vehicle just isn’t worth it.