Like sometimes I wonder about whether all the hassles of a paperless office are really worth the time I spend… and then I look around and see that I don’t have a lot of paper cluttering up my life everywhere, and it’s great… could I file everything and take less time… maybe. But the intangible feeling of calmness of not having a cluttered house and office makes it worth it.

However, if I was buying a car based on the “greenest” option, I’d get a used Geo Metro (or other efficient car) and spend some money fixing anything that needed fixed to go another 100,000 miles. In the end I’d have a car that is a lower cost to me and less environmental impact than a new hybrid.

How do you include this into the equation?

For productivity tools the same… What if it is a cool tool that makes whatever work more attractive, more joy to complete?That does add value to my day, no cash. It is not just money that makes me happy…

I think you need to meet a better class of hybrid owners!

I don’t know *anyone* who buys a hybrid thinking it is going to cost them less in the long run. Rather, they see the lower operating cost as the proverbial spoonful of sugar that helps the bitter medicine of the higher pricetag go down. But they’re not taking the medicine just so they can get that spoonful of sugar! They’re taking it so they can help cure the “disease” of carbon-based fuel consumption.

That said, your overall point has a lot of merit. But I’ll use Jennifer’s excellent observations as a stepping stone to note that one of the problems with cost/benefit analysis is that it *can* get exceedingly complicated (I should know–I’m an obsessive analyzer!) to try to account for all the relevant variables. So much so, that their comes a point of diminishing returns on the very analysis itself: if you’re spending an hour trying to save $10 on a purchase, or you’re spending 8 hours on figuring out whether it even makes sense to implement that 5-minute time-tweak, then you’ve gotten to the Yoda point: do, or do not.

It may actually be longer than this because you have ignored the time value of money. Remember if you save $7200 at the beginning you can invest it and get more out at the end.

“By the way, I hope there are some people who are saving money with hybrid vehicles. I have yet to meet anyone who is saving money, but there may be some specific situations where hybrids make sense. I haven’t done the math for someone who goes drives 30,000 per year, so perhaps it makes sense in that mileage range.”

I know a fleet manager who runs a medical courier business. Hybrids work best in stop-start traffic in city environments. A Prius taxi in Canada has clocked up 410,000km without a battery change. If this Prius is given to an average person who drives 15,000km per year instead of the huge amount of driving taxis do then that Prius’s batteries would last for more than 27 years. For taxis and medical couriers, stopping at the gas station every few days can waste time and money. This is where fuel-efficiency counts.

If possible, think of more examples of products and activities, and build a more extense, structured approach to the subject.

Also, you might want to mention that there are other types of decision making tools/methods other than cost/benefit, and you could establish a paired comparison or should I say, a paralleled analysis.

Love your blog.

@Jennifer – I completely understand the other benefits of lowering gasoline consumption. It sounds like there are a lot of people out there buying hybrids for environmental impact. I have not done any type of analysis on the environmental impact of purchasing a hybrid, but of the people I have talked to in person about their decision to buy a hybrid, cost savings was always mentioned. They really believed they were going to save money.

My point was to illustrate that everyone I have met who drives a hybrid hadn’t really done a ROI analysis. They thought they were saving money based on an emotional decision not a factual one. This is how most people analyze their productivity tools and often they end up sticking with things that waste time because of an emotional attachment.

But the key phrase there is “lower gas consumption.” At my current usage of ~45 mpg, I’m using a lot less gas than your average sedan owner, and a fraction of what’s guzzled by an SUV. The emissions on my car are lower than 99% of the vehicles in the Unites States today. This country is finally starting to wake up to the dramatic changes that must come about in our overall consumption of, well, everything if we’re going to have any hope of slowing the damage we’re doing to our environment, and hybrids are only the first step. Look, in an ideal world hybrid technology (or hell, zero-emissions transportation of all kinds) would be inexpensive and accessible to every citizen, but it’s not. Until it is, we need a paradigm shift of what is considered “valuable” in our society, and in this particular case paying more for technology that reduces my (buzzword alert!) carbon footprint on this planet is definitely worth the extra $5K I forked over when I signed those papers.

Please know that I say all that not in some smug, finger-wagging way, but rather to illustrate that the cost vs. benefit of driving a hybrid goes way beyond the simple black-and-white terms you’ve used in this post.

Then again, there are things that save both the environment and money (after a few years, of course). For example heat pumps (don’t know if they’re called that in english), which are basically “refrigerators” that take energy from the ground or air, and heat the home with it become profitable in about 10 years, which isn’t that long for a house. With some carrots from the governments this’ll probably change in the near future, too.