Top 10 Green Cars

If you’ve ever traded in a car or tried to sell it on your own, chances are that one of the first things that you did was to figure out the car’s Kelley Blue Book value. (You can also use this valuation if you hope to haggle with a dealer about a new-car and how much you think you should pay.) For as long as I can remember, the Kelley Blue Book (KBB) has been the gold standard for determining a car’s worth. So I was pretty excited to hear from the KBB people yesterday about a new section on the KBB website devoted to green cars.

Here’s what the KBB press release had to say about this new section:

“Kelley Blue Book’s new Green section allows new-car shoppers to obtain information about alternative-fuel technologies, such as hydrogen cars, diesel cars, hybrid cars, natural gas cars, electric cars and flex fuel/ethanol vehicles, as well as fuel-sipping gasoline cars. Kbb.com’s vehicle experts also will keep consumers up-to-date on the latest Green news and information from around the automotive world. The video section of KBB Green offers an in-depth, inside look at the latest eco-friendly vehicles on the market from both the Kelley Blue Book perspective and the carmakers’ themselves. KBB Green also features helpful tools such as the Perfect Car Finder® and the all-new Fuel Efficiency Challenge.”

This new section kicks off with a list of the Top 10 Green Cars. (Sorry about the annoying pop-up window on this preceding link, which asks for your zip code and doesn’t offer a “no thanks” option. I’m guessing that KBB has it there to tailor advertising to your geography. Whatever. It’s still annoying.)

I must admit that while some of the names on this list didn’t shock me–it’s a no-duh to expect the Toyota Prius to top such a list–some did surprise me. Can you imagine that a Chevy Tahoe Hybrid would be on a list about top green cars? My guess is that the “regular” version of the Tahoe is so fuel-inefficient that if you want to compare apples to apples–or Tahoes to Tahoes–that the hybrid version is definitely going to earn a gold star for being more fuel efficient than its V8 ancestor.

What I like most about this list is that four of the top 10 cars are not hybrids. This is great news for people who might not be able to pay the extra bucks that are automatically tacked onto a hybrid’s price tag. However, what’s not great news is how hard it has become to find affordable, fuel-efficient cars anywhere. I’ve read news reports about how a few years ago, SUVs were all the rage on the new and used-car lots. Now, people are trading in their SUVs for fuel-efficient cars, and, well, now these gas sippers are hard to find.

Add to that the fact that some car manufacturers simply can’t keep up with demand for their fuel-efficient cars, and while you may know which fuel-efficient car you’d like to buy, the real challenge becomes where to find one.

Of course, this is all moot to me since we own our Saturn VUE outright (not the hybrid version), and we just paid off our Ford Freestyle (purchased used last summer). Right now, it doesn’t make any sense for us to trade in these cars with V6 engines, in hopes of finding something more fuel efficient. (Ever heard of that phrase penny wise and pound foolish? Yeah, well that would apply here.) I mean, according to KBB, my Saturn VUE has a trade-in value of $6,730 to $8,350 and my Ford Freestyle has a trade-in value of anywhere from $10,565 to $12,700. That would hardly get me a Toyota Prius or Ford Escape Hybrid, which start at $20,870 and $27,775 respectively.