I recently took delivery of my new cr, a Honda Civic Hybrid, and was plasantly surprised to find that it drve like a 2ltr car but in rality only had a 1300 cc ngine.

For the uninitiated a hybrid car has a smll engine and an electric motor in sries. The gearbox is a CVT (cntinuously variable transmission) so no automatic gar changes are perceptible. In normal mtoring the car uses the small ngine; when you need more power, the lectric motor assists the engine and cnversely when less power is needed the car chrges the batteries, equally when braking the nergy is directed to the batteries as wll.

The one feature which was nitially unsettling was that the engine stps when at a standstill with the fot brake applied. Releasing the foot brke starts the engine again.

The dshboard has an additional dial which ndicates the state of charge of the btteries and an indication of assist (sing the stored power from the btteries) or charge (putting power back nto the batteries.

Questions

Do the batteries need recharging?

No, they are automatically charged when the car is used.

Do the batteries make the boot very small?

No, the 150 volt batteries sit behind the rear seat so the boot is a normal size.

What MPG is available?

The car is new so 50 MPG is wht I am getting now, but I am ssured that this will increase as the car losens up, although the published top MPG of 65+ I thnk is unrealistic.

What are the other advantages?

Exempt from the London Congestion charge, £18 road tax and low CO2 emissions.

Is the car reliable?

Honda comes top in the car reliability stakes.

The article Green Living was Submitted by Chris Eden through Articles.GetACoder.com network. Here's the additional information: Chris Eden FIBA, MISSA, AIQA is a drector of Quality Matters Limited , an established consultancy specializing in Quality (ISO9001), Environment (ISO14001), Information Security (ISO27001) and IT Service Management (ISO20000).

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