Good explaination. The whole point of hybrid technology is to capture some of the kinetic energy used in braking and coasting and store that in batteries for use in accelerating. You get a lot of that with stop and go in-town driving.
When going at steady highway speeds, all of the energy comes from the gas engine. I did notice that when driving in rolling terrain (e.g. Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee), there was some hybrid benefit. The car could store energy while coasting downhill and use that to help make it up the next hill. Still, almost all of the power is coming from the gas engine, not the electric motor.
I think I might have been inaccurate when I wrote about the price of the Prius base model. I bought mine in April of last year when all of the Toyota braking controversary was impacting their sales. IIRC, I ended up paying about $22K after trading in my 10 year old car. I think the normal price for the car is about $26K. The price might be higher today due to increased demand caused by high gas prices and production problems caused by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last March. From a purely economics point of view, I would’ve been better off buying a Corolla but being a big conservative geek, I like driving one of the geekiest cars on the planet. All it needs now is a “Drill Baby Drill” bumper sticker so I won’t be lumped in with all those liberal Prius drivers out there (who are among the most hated people on the planet).
