Rev up your engines, today I'm going to help you decide whether
it's a good idea or not to buy a hybrid car, now lately people have been asking me,
Scotty I'm thinking about buying a hybrid car, what do you think about that,
well we'll start with a little history lesson, hybrid's really started with submarines,
they have diesel engines that would recharge the battery,
or run the propellers and then necessary and they were under the water,
they would run only on the electric battery power,
now the early Honda hybrids used a system that was rather similar to the submarines
but it was a failure, people didn't like them, they hardly sold
any of them and they were really slow, as an example of this,
in 2013 Honda only sold 4,802 Insights, while Toyota sold 145,172 Priuses,
so right off the bat I'd say don't buy a Honda hybrid car,
if you want to get a hybrid car you want to use the Prius design, which actually most
manufacturers use, and that's an Adkinson cycle 4 cylinder engine
combined with a hybrid generating system, and using a hybrid battery pack to store the
electrical power, now the early hybrid used nickle metal hydrate
batteries, and they were rechargeable,
the modern ones use lithium ion batteries but for a long time they used nickle metal
hydrate batteries, now in the case of the Priuses,
originally they had 28 Panasonic hybrid modules and each module had 1.2 volt cells in it,
which would make 200 something volts for the whole system, the price of these batteries
has come down over time, now you can get a new one for about $2,600,
but I don't advise going any cheaper than that,
there are places that recondition them, but really you got an old worn out battery that's
made out of a bunch of little batteries, if they replace a few of the battery cells
in them, hey the other ones are still old and they're only going to break down over
time, you really have to go new if your planning
on keeping the car for a long time, so you have to decide how long your going
to drive your car, in the case of the Prius the newer ones come
with a 8 year / 100,000 mile warranty, so if your happy with that you'll never have
to worry about the battery, but if your planning on buying a used hybrid
car that's more than 8 years old that has more than 100,000 miles on it,
then you might want to think twice about that one,
because not only do the batteries cost a lot of money,
but other repairs cost a fortune too, like this one that burnt out the generator,
a customer towed her Prius over to my place because it died while she was driving down
the road, and found out that it wasn't putting out any
charging voltage at all, so I checked all the fuses and relays and
they were all perfectly fine, then I thought, hey it just needs a new alternator,
but guess what, a Toyota Prius doesn't have an alternator,
it uses a generator that's built into the transfer case,
now if it would have been an older Toyota like this old Celica,
the alternator is right here, you just take off a couple bolts and a fan
belt and replace the alternator, you could get a rebuilt one for $100 or so
and put in on in about 10 minutes, but sadly in this hybrid system that's not
the case, it doesn't use an alternator to charge the
battery, it uses a generator, inside the transfer case here it's not seperately
serviceable, I did a lot of research on the internet and
you have to buy the entire transfer assembly for $3,459.68,
and if that wasn't bad enough, it takes over 10 hours of labor to take it all apart and
put it all back together again, so most places are going to charge over $5,000
to do the job, and unfortunately in these 2002 Priuses it's very common for the generators
to short out they overheat and melt, and unless you want to keep buying giant batteries
and recharging them to drive the car, you have to fix it to make it able to drive,
and then of course you have to factor in the cost of the car,
they cost a lot more, how much gas mileage your actually going to get, and does this
amount to a profit over time, a lot of times it doesn't for normal people,
but I recently came back from Seattle and all the Uber drivers there were practically
all driving Priuses, since they get such better gas mile with regenerative
braking, in town, and a lot of taxi drivers do a lot
of in town driving, you see all these Priuses because they're
cheaper to operate, it's a business and your putting a lot of miles on it,
but if your just driving your car normally, you might find that the extra expense of buying
a hybrid, and if your like me and want to keep your car for 100,000's of miles,
the extremely high repairs your going to do as they get old,
it's not really worth it buying a hybrid for somebody who drives like that,
now my opinion on hybrids is this, I see them as a type of stop gap technology,
there half way between gasoline cars and electric cars and since your not fighting a war in
a U boat, it's really not that necessary for most people,
so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring
that bell!