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Actually, you can glide in EV up to 40 MPH. I find that I get the best mileage when I'm gliding around 35MPH on roads with no stop lights/signs. It's easy to regenerate the battery doing this, especially when going down a hill. You are right though, stop and go city driving can charge the battery by regenerative breaking.
Sorry, I didn't make my point clearly. My point is that during steady interstate cruising the hybrid system does not provide any MPG benefit, at least to the best of my knowledge.
During stop and go driving the gas engine operates more efficiently when accelerating (and this is true hybrid or no) but the hybrid's "schtick" is that it can recover some of the kinetic energy of the car into the battery.
So ironically while non-hybrids have higher highway MPG, the hybrid will have a higher city MPG.
A sufficiently hilly terrain will also get benefit from the hybrid.
But me, living in the rural West, if I wanted a late model Toy, and MPG was my goal, I'd go with something like the (conventional) Echo.
Sorry, I didn't make my point clearly. My point is that during steady interstate cruising the hybrid system does not provide any MPG benefit, at least to the best of my knowledge.
During stop and go driving the gas engine operates more efficiently when accelerating (and this is true hybrid or no) but the hybrid's "schtick" is that it can recover some of the kinetic energy of the car into the battery.
So ironically while non-hybrids have higher highway MPG, the hybrid will have a higher city MPG.
A sufficiently hilly terrain will also get benefit from the hybrid.
But me, living in the rural West, if I wanted a late model Toy, and MPG was my goal, I'd go with something like the (conventional) Echo.
You bring up some good points, however I wouldn't say that the hybrid doesn't benefit on the highway, since I still average well over 50 MPG. Honda's IMA in the Insight & Civic Hybrid actually performs better at highway speeds compared to the city.
The HSD in the Camry & Prius performs better in the city, like you mentioned.
Extra money to buy which Hybrid? My 2010 Prius cost $23,000. The Insight starts around $19,000 and you can find a Civic Hybrid without Nav or leather for the same price. I wouldn't call any of these vehicles expensive.
If we are talking about hybrid Camrys, its probably best to look at Camry prices for the sake of discussion, but a Prius can run north of $32k fully loaded - that's a lot of money for a car with no endearing traits other than getting good mpg.
Lets say you just want a basic camry, so your options are the least expensive base Camry and the least expensive hybrid Camry. A stock Camry sells for $19k and gets 22/33 mpg. A Camry hybrid costs $26 and gets 33/34 mpg. If most of your work commute is on the highway, you'll never see that $5k premium in price pay off. If you have a lot of stop and go, low speed traffic for your commute, you need to factor in what the extra 10 mpg city the hybrid gets for that extra $5k.
If you drive 12k mi a year, gas costs $2.50 (the national average now), and you only drive in the city, your annual fuel costs would be $900 for the hybrid and $1300 for the normal Camry. At $400/yr, it will take you 12.5 years to recoup the cost of the hybrid. If you drive exclusively on the highway, it would take you 50 years to break even!
Of course, most people drive combined, so if you take a weighted average you end up somewhere between 13-50 years to break even on the hybrid car depending on your ratio of city to highway driving.
The fact is, hybrids make sense if you don't mind paying the price premium, but people tend to underscore how hefty that premium is. On a straight dollars to cents argument, they don't make sense yet, but if you factor in feel good stuff like helping the environment, maybe there's value equivalent to $5k to you - that's a personal choice.
Well, I can't speak for the OP or others. My employer gave me a generous incentive for purchasing the Prius, so I guess I didn't have to worry about a premium.
You have to realize that there are many people that just want to support the technology.
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