A week or so back, The Christian Science Monitor reported:

Today's conventional hybrids command a premium price - $2,000 to $4,000 more than their nonhybrid counterparts - and their owners will recover that extra cost in about three years, assuming $3-a-gallon gasoline and 12,000 miles a year of driving, the report found.

Those numbers sounded suspicious to me, especially after I did the math myself, so I obtained the original report (bug ye not). What it actually says is (on page 15 of the PDF, page 9 of the report):

With a gasoline price of $3 per gallon, fuel for a 30-mile-per-gallon conventional vehicle driven 12,000 miles costs $1,200. A hybrid achieving 50 miles per gallon and driven the same amount uses $720 per year on gasoline.... the ... payback period for the hybrid relative to the conventional vehicle is just over seven years.

Seven years now? Wow. That's a big disparity. How did they screw that up? Simple. Reading further down the page, it says:

With battry costs at the long-term levels in Table 1, however, the picture is quite different. Assume that ... incremental costs for ... a hybrid relative to a conventional vehicle are $1,500, declining to $1,000 ion the long term... which assumes high-volume battery costs of $400 for the hybrid.... results in [a] payback period of 2.9 years.

The "long-term levels" they refer to are the cost of batteries if they are produced in much higher quantities than today. The CSM reporter took completely hypothetical cost and rate-of-return estimates and presented them as facts.

My point here isn't so much about the efficiency of hybrids as it is about bad reporting. The mistake was instantly obvious to me, and it took barely any time to prove it (most of the time was spent creating a fake account for the ACEEE site). And yet, a key fact presented in the article was still wrong and made press not only in the CSM, but as a reprint in Yahoo News and possibly other publications.

The moral is to find the primary sources when you can. Of course, the media enjoy too much their role as mediators to make that easy. Given how often they make mistakes, though, it's kind of necessary. I think this is part of why people feel disillusioned with scientists. A paper will appear in a journal describing how daily injections of a particular substance into a genetically-modified strain of mice caused tumors of the spleen to spontaneously reduce in size 38% of the time, which will turn into the headline "Cancer Cure Discovered!" This will happen in politics, too, where a bill that grants the President the power to arbitrarily detain and torture anyone he wants is called a "compromise." But I've posted enough about that subject for now, so I'll stop.

¶ 1379 Posted at 01.12 PM ⇒ No Comments ( oil | media | science! )