Unintended Hybrid Consequences

As more and more gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles make their way to the nation's roads, they bring a new problem along with them: proper training and equipment for those who respond to car accidents. It seems that flying at a Toyota Prius with traditional extraction tools, such as the famous Jaws of Life, may be a profoundly bad idea. The batteries in such vehicles carry up to 40 times the charge of traditional batteries. Cutting into one, therefore, could kill a potential rescuer. Thus the higher costs of hybrids rest not only on those dedicated enough to pay twice as much for a Prius as the similar sized Echo but on those of us whose taxes pay to train EMTs and such who deal with car wrecks. That's not a bad thing, just an interesting consequence that I imagine was not in the minds of many hybrid buyers.