Hybrid buyer's guide

By Dan Lienert

updated 5:30 p.m. ET Oct. 12, 2005

"I'm thinking about getting one of those hybrid cars" is something being said a lot these days.

Unfortunately, customers with such feelings don't have many choices — for now. Watch this space for future hybrid buyer's guides and you will see more and more gas/electric vehicles in showrooms. From mainstream automakers such as General Motors to low-volume specialists such as Porsche, companies of all sorts are hurrying to prepare hybrids for market.

The slide show that follows is a guide to 2006-model hybrids (the model year is already underway). The field is small now, but these types of vehicles are about to see a growth spurt. Companies that currently sell hybrids are planning to offer even more. Toyota Motor, which sells the Prius hybrid sedan and Highlander Hybrid and Lexus RX 400h hybrid SUVs, is planning to introduce a hybrid version of its top-selling Camry sedan next year, as well as a hybrid version of the Lexus GS luxury sedan, which will go into production in the middle or latter part of 2006.

Hybrids are also on the rise in America. Ford Motor chairman William C. Ford Jr. recently said his company's goal is to increase hybrid production tenfold, to 250,000 hybrids per year by 2010. About half of the models at Ford and its Lincoln and Mercury subsidiaries will have hybrid versions available.

One day, a hybrid option will be will be available on each car in a typical automaker's model range. Toyota, noting the popularity of the Prius (sales are up more than 130 percent this year and will top 100,000 units in 2005), recently established a goal of selling more than one million hybrids a year globally early in the next decade — about 600,000 annually in the U.S. Globally, Toyota is developing more than ten hybrid models.

Automotive shareholders, however, should note that not every automaker is gung-ho to build hybrids. Edmunds.com recently quoted Carlos Ghosn, Nissan Motor's president, as saying hybrids are a "terrible business proposition" and a "niche technology" accounting for "less than 1 percent of global sales."

Other automakers are finding hybrids will have smaller profit margins than regular cars — if they make money at all — until their development costs decrease. Toyota's Prius came out in 1997 and did not break even until just before the introduction of a second-generation car in model-year 2004.

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