The Mystery Of The Hybrid Car

I remember when I saw my first Prius - Toyota's hybrid car. I talked about it and was always on the look out for more sightings. I also remember when I discovered that there was one parked in our neighbourhood. Now, of course, there are two parked on my street, one just a few doors down.

Over the past 5 years, there has been significant sales of these and other hybrid vehicles:

In the past five years the number of hybrid sales numbers in the US grew tenfold from 9,500 in 2000 to 88,000 in 2004. By the end of 2005, the number of hybrid cars on American roads grew to over 212,000 vehicles in 2005 more than doubling 2004 sales figures. Hybrid sales figures in 2005 accounted for 1.3 percent of the total U.S. light-vehicle market.

In the case of the Prius, Toyota did a great job of designing a body that is unique and highly spottable. So we are seeing them more and more on the roads - but why don't we see them in the blogosphere.

Here is a BlogPulse graph for 'prius' and 'hybrid car':

And here is a similar graph from Technorati (note these values aren't normalized):

Graphs of message board data and usenet show a similar disinterest in hybrids.

So what does this tell us? To be honest I'm not really sure. Any ideas would be welcome.

Comments

[trev]

My two bits: The results indicate an underlying demographic schism. Hybrid buyers tend to be older, more financially established people with the means to support their idealism via the market. Bloggers tend to be younger,and idealistic via prose. They are scraping together enough cash for a not-quite-a-lemon 10-15 year old vehicle so they can get to the day job. Maybe it's a sweeping generalization, but it's what I see when I stand on the sidewalk waiting for the walk signal.

[Glenn Fannick]

I love my prius, but have never blogged about it. Not sure why.

[Steve Gelmis]

I'm surprised as well. I encounter many many hybrid and Prius references on the web, but that must be due to which blogs and news sources I follow.