What do you do when the battery dies?
One of the biggest concerns regarding hybrid vehicles – especially as they age and move into the used-car market – is the cost of replacing the battery pack, writes Christopher Smith in Motor1.com. Barring unexpected failure, the packs will eventually diminish to a point where they need replacing, and that usually comes with an exceedingly steep price tag of several thousand dollars. To alleviate some of the concern, Toyota announced it is offering buyers of its hybrid vehicles a new extended battery warranty. Starting with 2020-model-year vehicles, Toyota will cover batteries in its entire hybrid lineup for 10 years or 150,000 miles, whichever comes first. That’s up from the previous 8-year / 100,000-mile warranty, and it’s also good for those who buy a used Toyota hybrid on the secondhand market. In normal driving conditions, Toyota’s updated warranty covers the generally accepted lifespan of modern hybrid batteries, which is around 10 years and 150,000 to 200,000 miles on average, reports the magazine. As such, it would appear Toyota is keen on capturing more used-car shoppers in the years ahead.
SUVs cancel out fuel savings
Here’s the good news: Fuel efficiency improvements in smaller cars save over 2 million barrels of oil a day, and electric cars displace less than 100,000 barrels a day. And the bad news? Around 40% of annual car sales today are SUVs, compared with 20% a decade ago. That’s about 200 million SUVs operating around the world, up from about 35 million in 2010. Net result: SUVs were responsible for all of the 3.3 million barrels a day growth in oil demand from passenger cars between 2010 and 2018, while oil use from other type of cars (excluding SUVs) declined slightly, reports the IEA. If consumers’ appetite for SUVs continues to grow at a pace similar to that of the last decade, SUVs would add nearly 2 million barrels a day in global oil demand by 2040, offsetting the savings from nearly 150 million electric cars.
GasBuddy must go: Popular Mechanics
GasBuddy lets you compare prices at nearby gas stations, wherever you are. But it does so by gathering loads and loads of location data on you. That’s why Popular Mechanics has named the app one of the “7 Apps You Should Delete from Your Phone Right Now.” The reason? The company told its users about a privacy policy change through an email and a push notification: “If you access the Service through a mobile device, and if your preferences are set to permit collection of the information, we will also automatically collect information about your driving habits, including, but not limited to, driving distance, speed, acceleration and braking habits.” Says Popular Mechanics: Users surrender a lot of information for any service that uses geolocation, “but explicitly collecting data on your whereabouts in the background all the time feels like a full-on manifestation of Big Brother.”
Stop-and-stop
The average American commute grew to just over 27 minutes one way in 2018, a record high, according to data released this fall by the U.S. Census Bureau, reports The Washington Post. The average American has added about two minutes to their one-way commute since 2009, the data shows. “That may not sound like a lot, but those numbers add up: The typical commuter now spends 20 more minutes a week commuting than they did a decade ago,” reports the newspaper. “Over the course of a year, it works out to about 17 additional hours commuting.”