rev up your engines, today I'm gonna talk about what you should know if you're
going to buy a hybrid car, now anyone who's watched me in the past realizes
I'm not a big fan of hybrid cars they're an extremely high level of technology
and as they age they can cost a small fortune to repair correctly but that
said a lot of people are interested in them so I'm going to tell you the truth
about hybrid cars what you should know before you either decide to buy one or
not buy one, now the first thing of course is reliability you want a
reliable one okay this is a seven year old Camry Hybrid it's got 112 thousand
miles on it pretty much trouble-free texif four-cylinder gasoline engine
combines it with an electric motor and a huge battery something that has more
horsepower and can regenerate electricity when you slow down so you
don't waste all that energy in town you regenerate and on a highway the electric
motor gives a boost for more horsepower for example in this hybrid camry the
combination between the engine and the electric motor gives 200 horsepower
where a stock Camry the same size and everything with the four-cylinder engine
puts on a hundred and seventy eight horsepower so you got 22 more horsepower
to mess around with, now this isn't a Prius the Prius use atkinson cycle
engines which is small four-cylinder gas engines that don't have cams in them
it's an old design that kind of failed because they work fine but they don't put out
enough horsepower but since they want the biggest gas mileage they can in the
Prius they use an atkinson motor but this engine, it's just a conventional Toyota
four-cylinder engine it's not an a an atkinson cycle it's a normal engine, so
this Camry can get 43 miles a gallon in the city and 39 miles on the highway the
highways always lower because you're not regenerating on the highway where the
conventional tell you in a Camry with just a four-cylinder gas engine gets 25
in the city and 35 on the highway the 2013 Prius hybrid
it can get 49 miles a gallon on the highway and some of these people that
own Priuses, man they drive conservatively, I had a customer they
actually got over 50 miles a gallon I'm
highway but he drove like a snail too, you gotta take that in consideration half
the time he wouldn't even going the speed limits, in this the case of this Camry
Hybrid it's in between a regular Camry and a Prius it gets good gas mileage
better than the regular Camry but not as good as the Prius then you got to decide
what do you want a full-size car that's really nice or a little bitty Prius that
isn't quite as nice, now realize of course that all hybrid cars are insanely
complex this Camry air conditioning system it's not a normal one it doesn't
run off a fan belt off the engine, it's totally electronic, we look down here
there it is you can see that's the back side there's no belt running it, it's
electronically run only a pro should work on them it's not something that you
should even think about messing with besides the high amount of electricity
it can electrocute you, they have to use a special type of refrigerant oil, one
that doesn't conduct electricity, if you put regular oil in these things
you can end up shorting the compressor out so you need a dedicated set of air
conditioning equipment gauges just to work on these things, you can't use one
you use for everything else because if that gets contaminated by the wrong oil
it can short it out, so needless to say these are not DIY repair cars by any stretch
of the imagination, working on these things you need safety gloves that are
rated up to a thousand volts, then leather gloves on top of that you got to
test them every time before you work on the car you got to disconnect the power
pack and wait for it to power down, this is stuff that you don't want to mess
around with yourself, but as the saying goes if it ain't broke don't fix it, this
is a Toyota hybrid, they don't really have that many problems breaking down, you
don't break down you don't care how complicated it is, I
advise people if you're gonna buy a hybrid buy brand new one don't buy an old
one with a lot of mileage, let's say the battery decides to go out these
batteries cost thousands and thousands of dollars, only a pro can replace them
and I've noticed recently a lot of guys are offering these rebuilt and
remanufactured battery packs my advice to stay away from that stuff you'll get
some kind of a guarantee but the ones that I've seen they never lasted all
that long, this one has still got the original one seven years old I seen them
15 they're still working on the original ones, but since the battery packs are just
that they're a bunch of smaller batteries connected together, they start
to go bad they have machines to test them, they'll say oh so many of these are
bad we'll replace those, solder new ones in, but still you got a whole bunch of
old ones left they're not going to last 10-15 years, these remanufactured rebuilt
once, it's just a fact, so if you decide you want to buy hybrid, one I'd say buy
yourself a new one, and two decide what kind of driving I'm gonna do
I met uber drivers in Seattle they were all driving Toyota hybrid vehicles they
loved them because they do all kinds of stop-and-go driving and they got great
gas mileage in town sometimes two to three times of the vehicles, as they said
they had previously driven so they were sold on them, but that's a business
decision they know how much they pay for fuel, how many miles they drive, but if
you're just a normal person driving around and especially if you do a lot of
highway driving, hybrid Camry it only gets three miles a gallon better gas
mileage on highway than a non hybrid one, if your drive on a highway all the time all
that extra money you're paying for the hybrid, yeah you'll probably never recoup
your investment, and yeah in this case 23 more horsepower but truthfully when I
Drive them around I really can't tell the difference
between this and a regular Camry when I'm driving on a highway, really doesn't
make all that much difference acceleration wise, but that said I've got
lots of customers are driving Toyota hybrids and they're perfectly happy with
them they got well over a hundred thousand trouble-free miles on them just
really stay away from buying a low priced high mileage old one, because I
had a costumer buy one that was like 11 years old had 150,000 miles on generator
went out and it was gonna cost about five thousand dollars to repair it
because the design the engine of transmission had to be taken out was a
very expensive thing to do and hey who's gonna spend that on a car that they only
paid $1,500 for, now I do have to say they're better design than he used to be
even in this 2013, hey there's a lot of room in the trunk, the battery doesn't
take up all that much space yeah it's a little bit smaller than the regular
Camry that goes a little deeper down a little bit further but it still holds a
lot of junk, look at all the stuff my customers got in a trunk
comes the price this hybrid Camry is six thousand dollars more
the non-hybrid Camry, now if you don't mind that price differential and a
realization that repairs when they finally do break down if you keep them
long enough are gonna be a lot more than the non-hybrid Camry, you might think hey
I don't drive stop and go all the time in a business, that I'll ever recoup
$6,000 in costs so you might just go for the regular Camry, that cost really
depends on a lot of things even in a world economic status gasoline is
presently relatively cheap if gas gets to be super expensive having a car that
gets that much better gas mileage in town it's gonna be an even bigger reason
to buy the vehicle, just realize that you're gonna have to find a mechanic
we've got some great scan tools and who really understands hybrid cars and high
voltage electricity, all these orange wires over here, down here 200 volts up can
kill people 12 volts you can stick your tongue on a battery and your hand on the
other table in battery and it won't hurt you at all but you don't want to be
messing around with 200 volts, so now you know what to look for if you're thinking
about buying a hybrid car, so if you never want to miss another one of my new
car repair videos remember to ring that Bell