Jamie Lincoln Kitman, the New York bureau chief for Automobile Magazine and a columnist for Top Gear, a British magazine, had an interesting article in the New York Times over the weekend.

Life in the green lane

…just because a car has so-called hybrid technology doesn’t mean it’s doing more to help the environment or to reduce the country’s dependence on imported oil any more than a non-hybrid car. There are good hybrids and bad ones. Fuel-efficient conventional cars are often better than hybrid sport-utility vehicles - just look at how many miles per gallon the vehicle gets.

Being a professional car-tester, which is to say a person who gets asked for unpaid car-buying advice practically every day, I know these distinctions have already been lost on many car buyers. And I fear they’re well on their way to being lost on our governments, too.

Kitman reminds us about the law of unintended consequences,

Pro-hybrid laws and incentives sound nice, but they might just end up subsidizing companies that have failed to develop truly fuel-efficient vehicles at the expense of those that have had the foresight to design their cars right in the first place. And they may actually punish citizens who save fuel the old- fashioned way - by using less of it, with smaller, lighter and more efficient cars. All the while, they’ll make a mockery of a potentially useful technology.