Master Dissertation from London

[bradlee]

Hello MiHG members and friends,

A MiHG friend of ours in London, Julia – Caroline Schmidt, has ask if we could help her to get information for her Master Dissertation for the London School of Economics on “The Public Perception of Hybrid Vehicles”

I will be sending this request out to all our members and friends and will post on various sites as well. I’ve included a short statement from Julia as well as her link below. If we could assist her in answering her questionnaire and email it back to her by July 25, 2007 we would be doing a great service to Julia and the hybrid movement.

Since we’re all in this together, I would appreciate your consideration in helping Julia out.

Bradlee Fons
Milwaukeehybridgroup.com


As part of a Master programme in International Management at the London School of Economics a project on "The Public's Perception of Hybrid Electric Vehicles" is currently being carried out on a world wide basis. The aim is to get a better insight about how the general public, hybrid vehicle owners as well as non owners feel about topics such as the environment, innovations and automobiles in general. For this reason a questionnaire of multiple choice questions has been compiled.

Thank you very much for your time and support in answering the questions from the link below,

Julia - Caroline Schmidt

http://psych2.lse.ac.uk/hybrid

[lightfoot]

I did it but had to grit my teeth in a few places:
(1) The questions about hybrids being pricier: for me, a HCHII is actually CHEAPER to buy than the equivalent EX w/AT, thanks to various tax breaks. Even without them, the differential is not huge. The differential varies wildly among different models, plus any additional cost will probably decrease as the production of hybrids increases.
(2) The underlying assumption that simply buying the technology will give increased gas mileage. The whole point of this forum is that better driving habits will have at least as great an impact on mpg as improved technology. There is no place in the questionnaire to indicate that.
(3) Ditto for no place to indicate that driving for mpg can be just as much FUN as performance driving, once you get your head recalibrated.
(4) It's hard to know how to respond to question 32 if you already own a hybrid. Strongly disagree might be scored as already own one, hate it, and would not consider buying another.
(5) The "hybrids doing well in stop-and-go traffic" seems confused. Everything suffers in stop-and-go, but the Prius does better than most apparently. HCH II and Insight like moderate highway speeds apparently.

Best of luck on the thesis - it's hard work!