Remember when we were in elementary school and Pogs were the coolest ever? And in junior high, when Gigapets and Nanobabies could be heard beeping happily in every classroom?
Now we’re in college, mostly grown-up, and the newest and coolest fad is the hybrid car.
Celebrities have been touting the hybrid car for the last few years, and “The Simpsons” has been making fun of them ever since the Mel Gibson episode.
If that’s not enough to indicate the hybrid’s cool-factor, I don’t know what is.
Despite their trendiness factor, hybrid cars are a very practical innovation of the automotive industry.
With gas averaging $2.23 per gallon across the country, buying a more fuel-efficient car seems only logical.
Although hybrids do generally cost more than other new cars, decreased dependency on gas will eventually recoup that expenditure.
The cost of a hybrid car is also expected to decrease in the future as the technology for hybrids continues to develop.
For consumers with long commutes, increased gas mileage is becoming more of a necessity.
A commuter student on this campus who lives in Layton drives about 50 miles every day to get to the U. Imagine having a car that averaged 50 miles to the gallon instead of 30.
Hybrid cars can also help out around tax time. Recently, President Bush proposed that the federal tax deduction for owning a hybrid car be raised from $2,000 to $4,000.
The simple economics of the matter are certainly indicating that hybrid cars are the wave of the future.
Hybrid cars also help the environment by reducing fuel emissions and dependency on a finite supply of fossil fuel.
Increased gas mileage means that cars are burning less fuel and people are filling up at the gas station less often.
According to The Physics Factbook, there were more than 600 million motor vehicles in the world in 1997.
If current trends continue, we can expect to see 1.2 billion cars on this planet by the year 2030.
Barring the extinction of our species, there is no foreseeable solution to the more people, more cars, more pollution problem.
Hybrid cars, however, go a long way in helping alleviate the problem. Hybrid cars are more than just a passing trend.
They make sense economically and environmentally-and we’re only going to be seeing more of them in the future.