Even greenies are defying Papa Obama’s forced marriage to electric vehicles.<\/p>\n
“A study released Monday by Southfield, Michigan-based auto research firm Polk shows that 35 percent of hybrid vehicle owners chose to purchase a hybrid again when returning to the market in 2011,”\u00a0reports Dave Shepardson<\/a>\u00a0at The Detroit News.”If repurchase behavior among the high-volume Toyota Prius owners isn’t factored in, hybrid loyalty drops below 25 percent.”<\/p>\n In other words, after driving a hybrid-electric car, 65 percent of buyers – a high, income, self-consciously green demographic – reject them. That helps explain why hybrid sales have flat-lined at just 2-3 percent of vehicle sales after over a decade on the market – and despite huge buyer tax incentives and a doubling of hybrid model offerings since 2007.<\/p>\n The Prius divorce rate is significant too as the iconic Toyota makes up 50 percent of sales. So a staggering 75 percent of non-Prius buyers reject hybrids after owning them – no doubt because they can’t justify their $5000-plus markup on a standard gas model, a markup they\u00a0don’t get back in gas savings<\/a>.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Obama has mandated that all cars be hybrid-electric – or electric – by 2025 with his 56-mpg efficiency edict. Just as federal light bulb standards eliminated the traditional light bulb by dictating a 20 lumens per watt efficiency standard (thus eliminating, for example, the 17 lm\/W, 100-watt incandescent), no current gas-powered car comes close to meeting Obama’s 56-mpg standard. Not one.<\/p>\n