So can whats the monthly cost(car payment + gas bill) of say a new hybrid with this $7000 dollar rebate compared to a say coventional, cheaper used car?

Well heres what i came up with:

A $22,000 dollar hybrid with the $7000 rebate is a $15,000 car loan.
At 10% APR on the loan for 5 years is $318/month. Now say this car gets 50miles/gallon and has an annual mileage of 15,000 miles which is 1250 miles a month and 25 gallons of gas a month.
Say an average of $4/gallon that $100 a month in gas bill + the car payment for a average grand total of ...$418/month.

A $10,000 car loan for a conventional vehicle at 10 APR for 5 years is $212/month. SAy this car gets 25miles/gallon and has an annual mileage of 15,000 miles which is 1250 miles a month and 50 gallons of gas a month. Again an average of $4/gallon so thats $200 a month in gas bill + car payment for a averagen grand total of....$412/month.

Ahh a $6 dollar difference...thats pretty damn good

But how about for a say 7,000 car loan for a conventional vehicle at all the same variables as the 10,000 car. That would be total average montly payment (gas+loan) of .....$348/month

Hmm..thats what a $70/month difference between a brand new hybrid and a 7,000 used car. That doesn't sound to bad at all.

So can lower income people afford a hybrid vehicle with this rebate? Seems its feasible.

Now a million hybrid cars at $7,000rebate/car..well that 7 billion dollars in incentives.

In terms of gas savings and this is im sure not the most acurate statistics lets say 25miles/gallon for conventional and 50m/g for hybrid, with an average of 15,000 miles/car traveled annually.

So thats 300 gallons/car saved annually, which relates to about 300,000,000 gallons of gas for 1 million hybrids saved annually...at 42gallons/barrel so thats about 7,200,000 barrels of gas we don't have to import annually at $120/barrel...which is about $864,000,000 a year saved on import costs. so how many years will it take to pay off the initial 7 billion dollars in incentives? well that less then 10 years...so if you put 100,000 new hyrids with this incentive on the road every year there would be a net cost of $0 dollars over a 10 year period due to the savings in buying oil from another country and keeping that cash in our own economy and auto industry..sounds like a sound plan to me..ahh whats a better idea then giving american owned auto companines and employees the coin or give it to middle eastern royal families so they can buy another 1,000 jets and make more ridicuioulsy lavish palaces..hmmm?

Well to me the numbers seem to work but maybe its over simplified, but its not that oversimplied i mean when you do LCC(life cycle costs) you really need to but inflation and a few other numbers into the equations but this is just a pretty close approximation. Maybe i missed something though check the math and critiqueif ya like.