The environmental benefits of hybrids may be widely accepted – lower emissions – but for commercial operators to adopt them, the operating costs will also have to be competitive.

Are they?

Hybrid vans and trucks are too thin on the ground for there to be any meaningful data about comparitive operating costs, but hybrid cars – particularly in the US – have been around for a while now.

In a recent article, CNN Money calculated the payback time for some popular hybrids – how long before the extra cost of the hybrid pays for itself in fuel savings?

The results made interesting reading. Based on driving 15,000 mile a year – much less than most commercial operators – the Toyota Prius should put you into profit after 4.2 years – not unreasonable. The worst result came from the Lexus LS600h – it would take a full 3,771 years before you actually moved into profit when compared to the regular LS460 model. But let’s be honest – anyone who buys a car with a 5 litre engine clearly isn’t an environmental fanatic (or poor…).

These figures are based on US fuel prices, however.

For UK drivers, these savings should be much more impressive – given that our fuel costs are about 2.5 times those of US drivers. Assuming we pay roughly the same prices for our hybrid vehicles as US residents, UK hybrid operators should be able to save a lot more money on fuel bills than their American counterparts.

In the real world, we probably pay a little more for our vehicles, but the savings should be significant all the same, don’t you think?

Update: Hot on the heels of this post comes a report from the OECD, no less, entitled “Biofuels: Could the Cure Be Worse Than the Disease?”

I hate to say I told you so… (Full details here)

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It’s time for another prediction about the future of light commercial vehicles (vans to you and me):

Hybrids will be big for the next 10-20 years – and they deserve to be much bigger than biofuels.

Hybrid-powered vehicles, in case you haven’t come across them yet, utilise both a diesel or petrol engine and an electric motor.

At low speeds, the electric motor is driven by some beefy batteries and the main engine is off – meaning zero emissions and zero fuel consumption.

Once speeds rise, the diesel or petrol engine automatically kicks in and starts providing extra power – for out-of-town driving speeds. The batteries for the electric motor also get charged by the main engine while it’s running.

So that’s hybrids – back to my predictions…

Hybrid setups provide two massive advantages:

• A considerable reduction in urban emissions – where the electric setup is most at home
• A considerable improvement in fuel consumption – urban and stop/start driving (think motorway queues) gives very poor fuel consumption

Hybrid drivetrains are really starting to take off commercially now – both in the USA and in Europe. They are politically acceptable, increasingly technologically practical and seem to scale quite well, too.

Hybrids have always been more expensive than non-hybrid setups, but that cost differential is gradually being eroded, too.

So what’s this got to do with commercial vehicles?

As well as well-known hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius, which are already in commercial production, commercial vehicle manufacturers are increasingly experimenting with and trialling hybrid drivetrains for their larger, more fuel-hungry vehicles.

I firmly believe that in the short-medium term, hybrids will triumph over most of the alternative fuels that are currently being hyped up – especially biofuels.

Biofuels – (e.g. biodiesel) seem to me to be a poor compromise. They seem to cause as many problems as they might solve.

They drive farmers to start farming for fuel production instead of food (driving food prices up). They will also inevitably cause less-developed countries to sacrifice even larger swathes of jungle and much-needed fertile farming land to start producing cheap oil for fuel use*.

Simple economics make these consequences inevitable.

On top of that, biofuels don’t address the consumption issue – a diesel vehicle’s fuel consumption doesn’t change just because it’s using biodiesel.

To me, one of our targets should be to do more with less.

Hybrid’s have the advantage of enabling us to do exactly that – and of making the most of existing technology, fuel supply chains and infrastructures. I’m convinced that hybrids will be one of the main bridging technologies that sees us through until the next revolution occurs – be it fuel cells or something else.

What do you think?

(*For example, see “The western appetite for biofuels is causing starvation in the poor world”– The Guardian, 6th November 2007.)