Senator Takes Hybrid Hummer on a Semi-Wild Ride

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has a knack for puncturing Capitol Hill's bubble of obliviousness. His classics include the spotting of Senate Environment & Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) leaving an event that protested high gas prices in an 18-miles-per-gallon car -- for the one-block trip back to her office.

In his latest dispatch, Milbank takes on the hybrid Hummer H3, a new model produced by Raser Technologies of Provo, Utah, that claims to get 100 miles to a gallon of gas. Raser's home-state senator, Orrin Hatch (R), climbed behind the wheel of one of the monstrous "green" vehicles yesterday, with less-than-stellar results:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) had fun with a hybrid Hummer. (Photo: UPI)

Hilariously, Hatch's home-state newspaper had a much kinder interpretation of the affair. The Salt Lake Tribune described the senator as "carefully avoiding a troupe of photographers and reporters" as he steered the hybrid H3, which uses a 40-kwh battery pack that weighs 600 pounds on its own.

Leaving aside the frightening thought of a hulking military-style vehicle being repackaged as "green" -- for the bargain price of $50,000 -- the hybrid H3's claim to 100-mpg status is pretty misleading.

For one, the car has a range of 40 miles on its plug-in electric battery before its 11-gallon fuel tank kicks in. But those first 40 miles aren't gimmes; if Hatch had to make a long trip in the D.C. area, he'd be paying 12.83 cents for every kilowatt-hour in the car's battery pack. The 100-mpg figure is an average of the H3's gas-free first 40 miles and its subsequent fuel-using mileage. How many miles to the gallon does the hybrid Hummer get when you factor out its electricity-based miles? It's tough to say.

What we do know is that Hatch is a longtime supporter of tax credits for producers and purchasers of plug-in hybrid vehicles, including a proposal to give government money to electric utilities that offer rebates to plug-in drivers. His co-sponsor in that effort: then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL).