Lexus: The hybrid debate blog

Buying a car, or indeed any other form of personal transport, has always been a public statement of values, status or hang-ups. So, in order for the majority of cars on the road to be hybrids, our relationship with personal transport would have to change significantly.

Today, if a hopeful politician arrives at a constituency selection committee on a Brompton folding bike, they are clearly making a statement about their commitment to the environment (and also that they are not short of money, since green icons are expensive). If, on the other hand, they arrive in leathers on a Harley Davidson, the message is clearly very different.

Self-image is a critical factor in car purchases. Consider, for example, a middle-aged man selling his reliable Volvo and buying a red Porsche; a successful property developer driving a Humvee; or a 20-something replacing the perfectly functional exhaust system on his not-very-powerful hatchback with a four-inch diameter pipe, thus producing an additional 20 decibels but a negligible improvement in performance.

During the 1980s, and especially in conurbations with a high proportion of large-industry employees, it was often possible to identify someone’s job from the car parked on their driveway: the Rover 400 showed the person was a section leader; the 600, a department manager; the 800, a director; and so on. In other words, each driver’s status was in inverse proportion to their fuel economy. If a hybrid future, the reverse would probably be true: the cleaner the car, the higher your rank.

But could this inversion really occur? The problem with the hybrid dream is that it does away with certain sensory experiences - ones that have traditionally signalled the excitement, status and liberty of driving. Would a Harley running on a near-silent electric motor have the same presence as a traditional combustion-engined model? And would a teenager feel able to impress their friends with a whisper-quiet car - fitted with collision-avoidance safety systems and GPS-controlled speed limiters - that had to be plugged into the mains from time to time?

If the majority of drivers were to embrace the hybrid, and the next generation of electronic safety systems, it would have to be because they had changed their relationship with personal transport fundamentally. The successors of Jeremy Clarkson might continue to be filmed driving environmentally disastrous vehicles, but they would be seen in the same light as steam traction-engine enthusiasts, keeping alive the memory of historic machinery. For the rest of the population, the car would revert to "a means of getting from A to B".

Having said that, tearaways could still compensate for limited speed and power by installing bigger and better sound equipment. The average hybrid has an electrical system capable of delivering 50kW, so it could be used to power amplifiers and speakers to neighbourhood-shattering volumes - as long as the owners were content to drive very slowly during loud passages.