Get Your Hybrid Schwerve On Soon

If you're considering a new car and going the hybrid route with the loverly Toyota Prius, sooner is better than later if you plan on taking advantage of the $3,150 tax deduction. Treehugger (with source material from Jalopnik) have the details:

According to The Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPACT), signed into law last August and effective January 1, the tax credit buyers receive for purchasing a hybrid car begins to phase out after an automaker sells 60,000 of the eligible vehicles between the beginning of 2006 and the end of 2010.
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According to the Detroit News, after selling 146,533 hybrids last year, Toyota is on track to hit the 60,000 mark in the first half of 2006; the sun is definitely setting on the automaker's ability to offer full tax credits. That means that the deductions for both Prius (currently US $3,150) and Highlander ($1,950 for front wheel drive and $2,200 for four wheel drive) will likely be cut in half starting later this year, and will continue to drop as more are sold.

Jalopnik adds:

That deduction reduction would be good news for Ford, whose Escape Hybrid and Mercury Mariner Hybrid are eligible for a credit of $2,600 for the two-wheel-drive version ($1,950 for four-wheel-drive models) this year (a 30% improvement over 2005), giving them a slight edge over the dominant Prius in the marketplace later in the year if the Prius oversells its credits as projected. (Ford sold 1,403 Escape hybrids and 148 Mariner hybrids in December 2005).

Do you still need some convincing to go the hybrid route? Check this out, via Wired's Autotopia:

Edmunds estimates that the 176,000 hybrid vehicles purchased in 2005 saved their owners approximately $112 million in fuel, based on an average fuel price of $2.32 per gallon. That's money that can be spent on other goods instead of oil (more than 50 percent of which comes from outside the U.S.).

Extrapolating the data for 2006 (this is my back-of-the-envelope calculation, so don't complain to Edmunds) , if we assume that hybrids save approximately 274 gallons per year compared to non-hybrids, then the 256,000 hybrids sold in the last two years will save more than 70 million gallons of gasoline this year.

That translates to 1.7 million barrels of oil. Since another 350,000 or more hybrids will likely be sold this year, for 2007 the savings could reach 4 million barrels. Okay, so it's far from the "potential" ANWR reserves of 5.7 billion, but it helps.