carcounsel.com |HID|

Click here for 4car’s impression of first Hybrid based on a car that’s not fundementally flawed.

UPDATE: Now Britian’s What Car? has driven it too; here’s an excerpt from their overview

Ride & Handling: 2 stars – All that electrical gubbins in the hybrid system adds weight to the Civic, and the car leans quite a lot in corners. This model is based on the US-spec Civic saloon, and the soft suspension makes the car float over crests. It doesn’t ride that well over bad surfaces, either, and the brakes tend to snatch.

These pics from Top Gear show us Lexus wasn’t kidding when they promised more dynamically styled cars in the future.

The new IS looks even more serious in the flesh than in photographs. The next LS - rumoured to be coming in regular & long wheelbase forms as well as a performance enhancing gas-electric option – finally looks as a competitor to the S class et al should.

Like ‘SUV’, the term ‘hybrid’ has become a media buzzword that’s now being slapped on an increasing number of vehicles. While many deride SUVs as unsafe and inefficient, I can name cars that don’t handle as well and drink more fuel than – say – a Subaru Forester or BMW X3.

I recently drove the Lexus RX400h in the type of urban driving that the hybrid is supposed to be best at and averaged 18 miles per gallon, while Motor Trend’s Long Term test of a 2004 Chevy Silverado Hybrid resulted in an overall average of 14.8mpg.

Has ‘hybrid’ simply come to mean ‘less inefficient than it might have been’?