rev up your engines, today I'm gonna talk
about what you should know if you're going to buy a hybrid car, now anyone
who's watched me in the past realizes I'm not a big fan of hybrid cars they're
an extremely high level of technology and as they age they can cost a small
fortune to repair correctly but that said a lot of people are interested in
them so I'm going to tell you the truth about hybrid cars what you should know
before you either decide to buy one or not buy one, now the first thing of
course is reliability you want a reliable one okay this is a seven year
old Camry Hybrid it's got 112 thousand miles on it pretty much trouble-free
texif four-cylinder gasoline engine combines it with an electric motor and a
huge battery something that has more horsepower and can regenerate
electricity when you slow down so you don't waste all that energy in town you
regenerate and on a highway the electric motor gives a boost for more horsepower
for example in this hybrid camry the combination between the engine and the
electric motor gives 200 horsepower where a stock Camry the same size and
everything with the four-cylinder engine puts on a hundred and seventy eight
horsepower so you got 22 more horsepower to mess around with, now this isn't a
Prius the Prius use atkinson cycle engines which is small four-cylinder gas
engines that don't have cams in them it's an old design that kind of failed because
they work fine but they don't put out enough horsepower but since they want
the biggest gas mileage they can in the Prius they use an atkinson motor but this
engine, it's just a conventional Toyota four-cylinder engine it's not an a
an atkinson cycle it's a normal engine, so this Camry can get 43 miles a gallon in
the city and 39 miles on the highway the highways always lower because you're not
regenerating on the highway where the conventional tell you in a Camry with
just a four-cylinder gas engine gets 25 in the city and 35 on the highway the
2013 Prius hybrid it can get 49 miles a gallon on the
highway and some of these people that own Priuses, man they drive
conservatively, I had a customer they actually got over 50 miles a gallon
I'm highway but he drove like a snail too, you
gotta take that in consideration half the time he wouldn't even going the
speed limits, in this the case of this Camry Hybrid it's in between a regular Camry
and a Prius it gets good gas mileage better than the regular Camry but not as
good as the Prius then you got to decide what do you want a full-size car that's
really nice or a little bitty Prius that isn't quite as nice, now realize of course
that all hybrid cars are insanely complex this Camry air conditioning
system it's not a normal one it doesn't run off a fan belt off the engine, it's
totally electronic, we look down here there it is you can see that's the back
side there's no belt running it, it's electronically run only a pro should
work on them it's not something that you should even think about messing with
besides the high amount of electricity it can electrocute you, they have to use
a special type of refrigerant oil, one that doesn't conduct electricity, if you
put regular oil in these things you can end up shorting the compressor
out so you need a dedicated set of air conditioning equipment gauges just to
work on these things, you can't use one you use for everything else because if
that gets contaminated by the wrong oil it can short it out, so needless to say these
are not DIY repair cars by any stretch of the imagination, working on these
things you need safety gloves that are rated up to a thousand volts, then
leather gloves on top of that you got to test them every time before you work on
the car you got to disconnect the power pack and wait for it to power down, this
is stuff that you don't want to mess around with yourself, but as the saying
goes if it ain't broke don't fix it, this is a Toyota hybrid, they don't really
have that many problems breaking down, you don't break down
you don't care how complicated it is, I advise people if you're gonna buy a
hybrid buy brand new one don't buy an old one with a lot of mileage, let's say the
battery decides to go out these batteries cost thousands and thousands
of dollars, only a pro can replace them and I've noticed recently a lot of guys
are offering these rebuilt and remanufactured battery packs my advice
to stay away from that stuff you'll get some kind of a guarantee but the ones
that I've seen they never lasted all that long, this one has still got the
original one seven years old I seen them 15 they're still working on the original ones,
but since the battery packs are just that they're a bunch of smaller
batteries connected together, they start to go bad they have machines to test
them, they'll say oh so many of these are bad we'll replace those, solder new ones
in, but still you got a whole bunch of old ones left they're not going to last
10-15 years, these remanufactured rebuilt once, it's just a fact, so if you decide
you want to buy hybrid, one I'd say buy yourself a new one, and two decide what
kind of driving I'm gonna do I met uber drivers in Seattle they were
all driving Toyota hybrid vehicles they loved them because they do all kinds of
stop-and-go driving and they got great gas mileage in town sometimes two to
three times of the vehicles, as they said they had previously driven so they were
sold on them, but that's a business decision they know how much they pay for
fuel, how many miles they drive, but if you're just a normal person driving
around and especially if you do a lot of highway driving, hybrid Camry it only
gets three miles a gallon better gas mileage on highway than a non hybrid one,
if your drive on a highway all the time all that extra money you're paying for the
hybrid, yeah you'll probably never recoup your investment, and yeah in this case 23
more horsepower but truthfully when I Drive them around
I really can't tell the difference between this and a regular Camry when
I'm driving on a highway, really doesn't make all that much difference
acceleration wise, but that said I've got lots of customers are driving Toyota
hybrids and they're perfectly happy with them they got well over a hundred
thousand trouble-free miles on them just really stay away from buying a low
priced high mileage old one, because I had a costumer buy one that was like 11
years old had 150,000 miles on generator went out and it was gonna cost about
five thousand dollars to repair it because the design the engine of
transmission had to be taken out was a very expensive thing to do and hey who's
gonna spend that on a car that they only paid $1,500 for, now I do have to say
they're better design than he used to be even in this 2013, hey there's a lot of
room in the trunk, the battery doesn't take up all that much space yeah it's a
little bit smaller than the regular Camry that goes a little deeper down a
little bit further but it still holds a lot of junk, look at all the stuff my
customers got in a trunk comes the price this hybrid Camry is six
thousand dollars more the non-hybrid Camry, now if you don't
mind that price differential and a realization that repairs when they
finally do break down if you keep them long enough are gonna be a lot more than
the non-hybrid Camry, you might think hey I don't drive stop and go all the time
in a business, that I'll ever recoup $6,000 in costs so you might just go for
the regular Camry, that cost really depends on a lot of things even in a
world economic status gasoline is presently relatively cheap if gas gets
to be super expensive having a car that gets that much better gas mileage in
town it's gonna be an even bigger reason to buy the vehicle, just realize that
you're gonna have to find a mechanic we've got some great scan tools and who
really understands hybrid cars and high voltage electricity, all these orange wires
over here, down here 200 volts up can kill people 12 volts you can stick your
tongue on a battery and your hand on the other table in battery and it won't hurt
you at all but you don't want to be messing around with 200 volts, so now you
know what to look for if you're thinking about buying a hybrid car, so if you
never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos remember to ring that
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