Did his Dad point out that VED was renamed, very appropriately to my mind, VD some years ago?
Hybrids are painfully bad for the environment mainly due to all the nasty nickel, the extraction of which is nastier than sharing a cell with Charles Bronson. A while back some Uni in America calculated that the CO2 emissions of gathering the raw materials, making the components, building a Prius, then shipping to to the US of A created more emissions than a Hummer H2 from birth, through 100,000 miles of motoring, then through final dismantling.