+ Kiplinger's calculator: Will a hybrid save you money?

Courtesy of Kiplinger.com, the online arm of the leading personal finance magazine, comes a handy tool for assessing the long-term implications of buying a hybrid. Two things stood out to me as I clicked around:

1. It's great to see tools that help consumers make eco-friendly purchasing decisions based not on ideological grounds, but on financial grounds. As many thinkers like Vinod Khosla know, adoption of these technologies and products
   
2. When evaluated on a total lifecycle basis, many hybrids are lower-cost only when gas costs about $3.75+ a gallon. As we saw this summer, it's not hard to imagine a scenario where gas costs far more than that, but until then, it may be tough to justify the purchase on a purely financial basis.
   

Click here to use the calculator yourself.