Hybrid Lovers Read This and Lament

On Mon, 21 Nov 2005, NJ Vike quoted from Car & Driver:

> Although the warranties are for eight years or 100,000 miles, battery
> replacement will cost $5300 for the Toyota and Lexus hybrids, and the
> Ford Escape replacements run a whopping $7200. Moreover, the industry
> types aren't talking about total battery life. Will they actually last
> 100,000 miles?

No. My officemate has an '03 Honda Civic hybrid. It started giving
problems on his way from Montreal to Toronto. The Integrated Motor Assist
system went offline, which also meant the SLI battery (Starting, Lighting,
Ignition -- the conventional 12v item under the hood) was not being
charged. When he limped into the parking lot, his SLI battery read 9.9v.

Towed to the dealer, who after three days gave the diagnostic report: The
traction battery's dead. Good thing the battery warranty is 6 years,
otherwise it'd be a C$8,000+ event. Dealer claims this is the first-ever
failure of a traction battery in a Honda hybrid of any year or model,
anywhere in the world (Sure, right...) and that a new traction battery has
to be brought in from Japan, which will take AT LEAST three weeks.

Of course, there are multiple different issues going on here. There's the
car problem itself, then there's the dealer's fairy tales. I can think of
half a dozen courier companies that'll happily get a package from Japan to
North America in a matter of a couple of days, so that shoots the "three
weeks to come from Japan" theory all to hell. And if this were indeed the
very first-ever instance of this heretofore unheard-of failure in one of
Honda's high-profile, high-PR-value enviro models, one would think the
company would be falling all over itself to make the repair as quickly as
possible to keep the customer as quiet as possible about it.

> How will this affect resale value?

Pah. What resale value? This kind of traction battery failure does NOT
bode well for the durability of these cars. Sure, it's covered under his
battery warranty. The new replacement battery does not reset the battery
warranty clock. What about in 5 years? They are disposable cars. 10 years
*tops*. More like "end of warranty plus time to next failure".

> This brings up an undiscussed issue: At some point, all these hybrid
> batteries will die and have to be disposed of somewhere, somehow. These
> are hardly biodegradable items like spoiled vegetables. They are in fact
> self-contained toxic waste dumps. How and where millions of these
> poisonous boxes will be deposited in the new hybrid nirvana has yet to
> be considered, much less resolved.

NiMH batteries are indeed hair-raisingly toxic and expensive to
reclaim/recycle. Once no longer in the dealer chain, they will simply get
tossed -- along with the rest of the car.

DS