News

Brian Pietrandrea is one of the lucky Western Pennsylvanians who bought his Toyota Prius hybrid before the price of gasoline jumped to $4 a gallon.

"I bought it right before the backlog hit. There were six on the lot at the time," said Pietrandrea, 33, of Ross, who bought the fuel-efficient car powered by a gasoline engine and a supplemental electrical engine in March.

Thanks to skyrocketing gas prices, the days of buyers like Pietrandrea driving a new hybrid home immediately are long gone, according to Western Pennsylvania auto dealers.

Buyers must wait two to three months or longer for their hybrids. Some dealers don't have waiting lists because they cannot get any more cars until the 2009 model year debuts.

"If we had 52,000 of them on the ground, they would not be on the ground" for long, said Steve Werksman, sales manager at Valley Honda in Monroeville.

The hybrids save fuel. The 2008 Honda Civic hybrid averages 40 miles per gallon in city driving and 45 mpg on the highway, compared to 25 mpg in the city and 36 on the highway for a gas-powered Civic, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The 2008 Toyota Prius, which only comes as a hybrid, offers 48 mpg in the city and 45 on the highway, the government says.

The hybrid's electric motor -- fed by a large nickel-metal hydride battery pack -- saves fuel by running the vehicle in stop-and-go city driving. The electric battery recharges through energy captured during the vehicle's operation.

At North Hills Toyota in Ross, where Pietrandrea bought his hybrid, general sales manager Matt Popovich predicted: "If we had 200 of them, we'd sell them all."

The demand for hybrids in Western Pennsylvania mirrors the national trend.

Waiting lists

"They (hybrids) are difficult to get. We're seeing a lot of that," throughout the nation, said John Tews, a spokesman for J.D. Power and Associates, a global marketing firm in Troy, Mich.,

The kink in the hybrid supply chain is the production of nickel hydride battery packs, said Greg Gardner, a spokesman for Oliver Wyman Group, a New York-based automotive researcher. Makers of the rechargeable batteries did not anticipate the surge in demand.

"It's particularly acute for Toyota," Gardner said.

Toyota is the leading manufacturer of hybrids. The Prius last year led the hybrid segment with about 179,000 new registrations, representing 51 percent of the market, according to data compiled by R.L. Polk & Co., a Southfield, Mich., automotive information company.

When gas last year cost $3 a gallon, the Pittsburgh market registered 1,808 new hybrids, up 30 percent from the 1,384 registered in 2006, said Emily Drake, a spokeswoman for Polk.

The market consists of 12 Western Pennsylvania counties, two in northern West Virginia and one in Maryland. The market ranked 44th in hybrid registrations among the nation's top 200 metropolitan areas, Drake said.

This year promises to be even stronger, Tews said. J.D. Power projects that hybrid sales will reach 422,000, up 19 percent from the 353,145 hybrids sold last year, Tews said.

At Kenny Ross Ford South Inc. in Castle Shannon, the owners of four new Ford Escape hybrids waited seven months for delivery to the dealership, said sales manager Robert Lauer.

"We're on a four- to six-month waiting list," said Brad Pavlik, sales manager at Toyota of Greensburg in Unity.

In a hurry

Hybrids are so popular that customers buy them without test-driving them, which is unusual, said Bob Sullivan, general manager at Star Chevrolet in Hempfield. The dealership recently sold four Chevrolet hybrids to buyers who could not get behind the wheel because the cars weren't in stock.

"We get three or four a month," said Mark Smail, president of Smail Automotive Group in Hempfield, which sells the Honda Civic hybrid.

Pietrandrea said he gets about 45 mpg combined city and highway driving with his Prius. When he made a 600-mile round trip from Pittsburgh to Detroit to see the Penguins in the Stanley Cup Finals, he used a tank-and-a-half of gas, which amounts to just 15 gallons. He can commute to work and do his various errands on just one 10-gallon tank of gas every two weeks.

Smail said his Honda Village dealership saw interest in the hybrid grow as the price of gas rose from $3 to $3.50 a gallon, and it's only gone up as gasoline reached $4 a gallon.

The demand for Toyota's Prius is so strong that the 2005 and 2006 models sold at area auto auctions are being bought at the manufacturer's suggested retail price, or even higher, Popovich said. Even hybrids reconstructed after accidents are commanding top dollar "just because of the fuel (prices)," Popovich said.

The manufacturers suggested retail price for the 2008 Prius starts at $21,500.

"It will never be enough of them to meet the demand," said Lud Druchniak, owner of Latrobe Chevrolet Ford.

• Most Read
• Most E-mailed
• Latest News