MORE ON HYBRIDS: New vehicles are offering more mean, less green — using the electric motors to produce faster acceleration rather than better mileage.

On the other hand, some people are talking about developing more-efficient plug-in hybrids that could get more than 100 miles per gallon. There’s some concern that people wouldn’t want to plug their car in — and I guess the manufacturers think that, because the literature for my Highlander hybrid repeatedly notes that it doesn’t have to be plugged in. Who would think that anyway? Apparently, their marketing research thinks that consumers are afraid of plugging in a car, though I wouldn’t mind.

One modification I’d like to see would be some control changes — I’d like it if the accelerator on my hybrid provided some kind of feedback that would let me know when it was about to switch to gas power so that I could back off if I wanted to keep from burning gas. I think that the design goal is to make it the transition as seamless as possible, but I suspect that a lot of drivers would rather know. Perhaps some sort of force-feedback mechanism that could be shut off if people didn’t want to be bothered, but that would let mileage-geeks manage things more closely?