New Car Buying

[Dimmauk]

Dont forget about the tax deduction for owning a Hybrid.

[Avinor]

This is not necessarily true, and depends on the hybrid system. Toyota's systems are largely optimized for city traffic, whereas Honda's are optimized for highway traffic. For example, the Prius' city MPG is actually higher than its highway MPG, but the Insight's highway MPG rating is higher than its city rating.

You can't draw conclusions about hybrids in general from the city/highway of any one individual car though. On the highway, you should be driving at a steady pace for a long period of time, allowing a regular engine to be very efficient. Furthermore theres almost no opportunity for the hybrid system to DO anything, since you aren't accelerating much for the electric motor to kick in (not that they do at high speeds), or braking to harvest energy that would otherwise be lost.

The advantages a hybrid would have at highway speeds are mostly to do with other elements: low rolling resistance tires, a slightly smaller or more efficiently tuned engine, tweaked aerodynamcis, adjusted gear ratios (unless its a CVT), and often electric power-assist steering/brakes. Most of these things are independent of the hybrid system though, and can be offered on standard cars.

[Elesirdur]

As I said in my above post I would still shy away from hybrids because of the additional environmental impact they cause due to the manufacture of their battery systems. Mining, transporting, and refining the heavy metals used in the battery systems requires vastly more energy and produces more CO2 emissions than you are likely to save driving a hybrid car. I would also agree with Anakron that Toyota's hybrid systems are maximized for stop-and-go congested city driving where the petrol motor only kicks in once the car needs to be moving above a certain speed.

Since the OP has a longer highway commute, a traditional petrol or diesel powered car would not only be better environmentally, but be a better use of those systems than a hybrid designed for in-city gridlock driving.

As an aside, I now see that Toyota is offering a 3dr Yaris in their S trim, which is basically the same as the RS model I have (previously unavailable in US as a Canada-only model - although the European Yaris had the option of getting the 1.8L 2ZZ-GE motor from the Celica GT-S as the T-Sport model, Europeans get all the cool hot-hatches -_-`) so it has ABS, full flat folding rear seats, and the nifty body styling. Though I'm not so fond of the '09 front facia, too much like the new Matrix, it's still the same engine and handling as the earlier cars - which is great. I took a road trip of about 800 miles on my Yaris last year and used about two tanks of gas, including 4 days of in-city driving. There's also a reduclious amount of room in those cars, but if you're over 6'1 the driving position isn't optimal.

One last note about the Yaris. Stay away from the Yaris Sedan, which is build off the Japanese Belta platform and does not stack up as well against the 3dr and 5dr liftback models which are the "proper" Yaris cars - being rebadged Toyota Vitz's in Japan.