This is the second in a series of posts about our Honda Civic Hybrid, which we’ve been running since September last year. In our first post we looked a little at car finance – particularly at the all-important questions of value for money and depreciation. This post is more in the same fiscal vein.

Fuel is probably the next most obvious cost, given that you have to stare at the numbers reeling upwards at an alarming rate every time you visit a petrol pump.

In our ten months with the Civic we’ve never managed to equal the 61.4mpg official combined cycle score. Our results haven’t been too bad, however. Around town we typically manage 40 to 45mpg without much effort, while on a motorway trip we usually see 55 to 60mpg according to the in-car trip computer, which is pretty accurate when compared with our costs at the pumps. We were quite surprised at how much the consumption varies with tyre pressures, so it really is worth checking each corner at least once a month.

We were gobsmacked at the variability in quotes for insurance. The Civic Hybrid fits in group 7 so shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg, but The AA wanted both limbs. It quoted us more than twice the amount asked for by the lowest quoter, Admiral. It really is worth comparing the meerkat. Asking Aleksandr saved us £600.

Our car arrived with 13,000 miles on the clock, and six months later at 18,000 it was time for a service. Browns Honda in Loughton proved to be polite and efficient although severely lacking in parking spaces. Having parked under a no-parking sign, we handed over the keys. Later in the day, Browns gave the car back to us in beautifully clean condition and relieved us of £241 including VAT. Of that, £58 went on fully synthetic oil, £37 on fluid for the CVT gearbox, an astonishing £47 went on air filtration, and £80 on labour. A new oil filter and waste disposal, plus the inevitable splash of washer fluid, accounted for the rest.

All told we’re on course to spend about £1,750 in direct costs in our first year with our hybrid – its second year of existence. Depreciation will push the tally up to £3,000 or about 30p per mile.

All of which sounds horrendous, but is actually not bad, as running costs go.

Over dinner, hosted by Volvo in the City of London, the conversation turns to electric cars. “Aren’t they a bit soulless?” asks one of our fellow diners. “No gears to change, no involvement? Just press and go?” There’s a murmur of agreement – but not from those around the table who’ve actually driven one.

Unless you’ve driven an EV, it’s hard to imagine exactly how involving the experience can be. The smooth delivery, the absence of noise - it makes you feel more connected to the road, not less, as if you’ve taken off a pair of thick woollen mittens for the first time.

A while later, the topic lands on twin-clutch gearboxes. One of our number, a staffer at Autocar, notes how the technology has transformed expectations about what can be done to combine both economy and urge. Dual-clutch boxes switch gears rapidly and seamlessly without human intervention, and after a few miles you cease to think about which gear you might be in and concentrate instead on the road. They can drop gears with more commitment than the average driver, making up for a relatively weedy engine, or change up promptly to encourage thrift.

It’s an interesting contrast. The electric car and the dual-clutch gearbox will both take us in the same direction – away from involvement with gears.

Give it a couple of decades and drivers will no doubt marvel that anyone ever wanted to swap cogs by hand, wrestling with a stick sprouting from the floor. Sooner than we might expect, the manual gearbox will graunch off into the sunset, going the way of the choke, the carburettor, and the spark-advance lever.

But we’ve strayed off topic. The occasion for our meal together is the launch of Volvo’s latest Emissions Equality campaign, an attempt to highlight the various nasties that emerge from exhaust pipes besides carbon dioxide – notably NOx, particulates and unburned hydrocarbons.

Volvo believes that the current focus on CO2 as a basis for car taxation – and as a shorthand for a car’s cleanliness – paints only half of a picture. Instead it is proposing a new colour-coded labelling scheme for air pollutants other than CO2, so that showroom stickers will present not one but two red-amber-green indicators, one for CO2 and another for air-quality impact. In the US, a similar dual-score system is already in use.

Volvo hopes to persuade its fellow car makers that there is merit in cleaning up their act, or at least clearly labelling it, with a further aim of influencing lawmakers to look beyond g/km of CO2.

If Volvo’s efforts succeed, it may go some way to reversing the current popularity of diesel engines, which are lauded for their low CO2 emissions even while they churn out microscopic soot particles that mess up the lungs of small children.

There are alternatives - advanced petrol-based powertrains, like Fiat’s MultiAir engines, Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive and GM’s Voltec range extender, all tackle CO2 but do so without the soot.

We hope Volvo’s efforts get off the ground. You can follow its progress, and add your voice, via Twitter or Facebook.

“No, no, go to the head of the queue,” insists our instructor, gesticulating firmly up the narrowing triangle of sliproad we’ve been trying to leave, to join the densely packed traffic on our left. We had assumed that our first eco-driving lesson was going to teach us how to be more considerate drivers, but instead we’re being taught techniques that would make a minicab driver blush. We do as we’re told and press nervously ahead in our non-lane, girding ourselves for battle with the white van we’ll shortly be needing to cut in front of.

Conserving fuel is, we’re learning, all about keeping moving when you might otherwise stop. Building up momentum uses fuel, slowing down wastes it. And the least thirsty way to get from A to B is at a constant speed with the motor turning inside its efficiency sweet spot – so that’s what we’re aiming for. Constant, steady speed. Early braking. Choosing the clearest bit of road and trying to avoid slowing to a halt. Politeness? We don’t do that.

This is our second run around a loop of crowded Parisian thoroughfares: over the Pont de Sevres, along the Rue de Tryon and Route de Vaugirard, aross the Ile Staint-Germain via the Boulevard des Iles, along the Quai de Stalingrad and back to where we started. Just over 5km or three and a bit miles, it takes 13 minutes and 29 seconds to complete, yielding an average speed of 14mph. At our first attempt, that is, with our hawk-eyed instructor simply studying the readouts on the laptop he has plugged into our Renault Clio Eco2 diesel’s dashboard. With what we thought was careful and prudent driving, we managed 40.6mpg on that first run. With which we were pretty pleased.

Second time around, our instructor is keen to point out all the things we did wrong. All the downhill slopes where we failed to entirely lift off the gas. All the red traffic lights where we foolishly stopped instead of braking early, so that we might roll over the line in second gear just as the colours changed. All the clear bits where we neglected to select fifth gear at 30mph. All the times when, like some red-misted racing driver, we let the engine stray beyond 2,000rpm.

At the end of lap two we can feel the difference even before the stats are presented. Cutting up that white van meant it took us 90 seconds less time to complete the circuit – making it 1.5mph faster. We stopped half as frequently, braked half as often, and spent half as much time standing still. The engine completed 15 per cent fewer revolutions and drank 25 per cent less fuel. The headline figures are 53.6mpg and 116g/km of CO2. Around town. With three people in the car. We are suitably impressed.

Our brief lesson is just a taste of a new Eco-Driving course that Renault will soon be laying on for its fleet customers, showing them just how much fuel – and thus cash – can be saved if drivers learn a few simple techniques. So don’t be surprised if you notice an upswing in Lagunas and Meganes sliding cheekily ahead of you over the next couple of years. The lessons will be particularly pertinent when Renault starts selling its electric cars early next year, where driving style can have a very large impact on the finite range available from an EV’s battery.

In our diesel Clio, our instructor was confident that within a few more loops he’d have got us under 100g/km and we don’t doubt him. The car’s official combined cycle rating is 98g/km.

No doubt you’ll have read lots of road tests where motoring journalists bleat that the official figures of frugal eco-cars simply can’t be achieved on real roads. Well, they’re all wrong. As we learned in Paris, they just aren’t driving right.

Thanks to Renault for providing our lesson - visit its Sustainable Mobility site for more eco motoring updates.

Here are a collection of unsorted factoids learned during our recent visit to Paris to learn about Renault’s upcoming electric cars and various other green motoring projects.

Quick-drop battery swap stations won’t be cripplingly expensive to set up, because they’ll only need to hold 10 batteries, with each battery costing about €8,000 to €9,000. Why so few? Using three-phase AC electricity it will take no more than 30 minutes to fully charge a flat battery. It takes three minutes to swap a battery, so each station can’t physically serve more than 10 cars per half hour – ergo the station only needs a pipeline of 10 batteries to keep on delivering ad infinitum. Two prototype swap stations have been built – one in France and one in Israel – and Renault says they have racked up tens of thousands of test swaps to date.

Unlike partner Nissan, Renault won’t be selling batteries with its electric cars, but will lease them. It says EV buyers who clock up at least 8,000 miles per annum will break even compared with fossil-fuel equivalents. By removing uncertainty about the cost of replacement batteries, Renault EV residual values are likely to be impressive. Drive more than 22,000 miles per year and you’re out of luck, though. Given long intervals for recharging, Renault’s EVs can’t really manage that many miles in a year...

Never mind range anxiety, what about battery life anxiety? Renault says it isn’t worried that its lithium-ion cells will conk out after a couple of years as most cellphone, iPod and laptop batteries do with alarming predictability. The secret to a long and happy life if you’re a li-ion cell is to stay cool, apparently. Active temperature regulation with liquid cooling will feature in all Renault auto batteries – and is notably absent from all laptops and phones.

The Renault Fluence ZE and Kangoo ZE will be built on the same production lines as their fossil-fuel equivalents.

Weight is key to consumption, as we all know, but it’s worth considering that every 10kg of car equates to about 1g/km of CO2 using today’s technology. To meet ongoing EU fleet emission targets, Renault is aiming to cut weight by 150kg to 200kg per generation as it introduces new models, saving 15 to 20g/km. Laguna 3 weighs 150kg less than its predecessor, for example. The company says weight is now just as important as cost and time to market when developing new models.

We drove a new Scenic fitted with Renault’s new dual-clutch manual gearbox, a dry-clutch six-speeder with electric rather than hydraulic actuators. Unlike a slushmatic it’s as economical as a manual in official consumption tests, and might even surpass manuals in the real world, according to the firm. We loved it – effortless in use, with imperceptibly smooth changes, and not afraid to jump down a couple of gears if you put your foot down. There’s a manual mode, but why would you bother?

Renault’s state-of-the-art factory in Tangier, Morocco burns olive stones as fuel for its industrial boilers, helping to make the plant a zero-carbon factory.

Forget piddling upshift reminders on the dashboard – Renault plans to use your satnav’s voice to coach you in more economical driving. We assume drivers will be able to switch the system off... Coaching will be key for EV drivers in particular to get the best range from the finite charge in their battery. While we were in Paris we received a taster session of eco-instruction, thankfully from a human being rather than a disembodied voice. We were sceptical at the outset but ended up being bowled over by the scale of our improvement piloting a diesel Clio around crowded city streets. Stay tuned – we’ll provide a full report in our next blog post.

Meanwhile, for more on Renault’s wide-ranging eco-efforts, visit its Sustainable Mobility web site.

It’s a sizzling summer’s day on the south-west outskirts of Paris. The traffic is unmistakeably Parisian, a clotted, cacophonous mayhem of diesel-dusted Renaults, Citroëns, Peugeots and Piaggios. We take the crowded Pont de Sèvres up and over the Seine and as a chauffeur-driven Citroën C6 draws alongside for a moment its cool, pin-striped passenger swivels round in his seat to have a closer look at us. It almost qualifies as gawping.

The attention is not just because our ride is unusually pristine and polished. It has more to do with the gaudy graphics that spell out “ZE 100% electric” in foot-high-letters across the rear windscreen. Today we are driving a Renault Fluence electric car, a battery powered five-seat saloon that Renault will bring to market in the middle of next year.

Our Fluence looks and feels like a showroom-ready product, although it isn’t quite fully baked just yet. It is devoid of the more obvious development-car addenda – there are no red panic buttons jutting from the dash or fire extinguishers bolted to the floor, although we do notice a plastic label riveted to the top of the driver’s airbag. It says “electrically correct”, which we suspect means that the airbag isn’t live but is pretending to be, for hassle-free steering wheel removal. So that’s a good reason not to crash, aside from the fact that prototypes tend to be worth quite a lot of money.

The most obvious difference between our test car and the Fluence ZE that will go on sale early next year is the size of its rear end. The lithium-ion battery – a bulky, quarter-tonne box the size of two big suitcases – lives immediately behind the rear bench, squatting directly over the rear wheels and occupying most of what might normally be called the boot. Hence a little rump surgery is due, which will elongate the production ZE body by 15cm compared with our standard Fluence bodyshell. Even after the stretch, boot-space will be tight compared to the fossil-fuelled Fluence.

Klaus Stein, the project leader responsible for Renault’s electric powertrains and batteries, says the engineering team are still tinkering with the car’s setup ahead of its public debut, finessing software and tweaking suspension settings. “The battery has a big influence on handling,” says Stein. “Moving it just a few centimetres backwards or forwards makes a big difference.”

From the driver’s seat, however, it feels like those engineers can’t have much left to do. The Fluence ZE is already beautifully set up, with enough compliance to shrug off scabbed surfaces and little hint of a rear weight bias in sharp corners. We had expected more body roll, given that the Fluence carries its bulky battery high up compared with many other EVs. Instead of spreading the heavy cells out along the floorpan, as Nissan does with its Leaf EV, Renault has packed its cells into a big, oblong box, filling a void between the high parcel shelf and the floor. The design is no doubt a consequence of Renault’s decision to pursue battery swap-stations, which will need to be able to pull out the battery as a unit from beneath the car, without requiring too big a chassis-weakening aperture. As it is, the battery case, once bolted into place, is a stressed member, according to Stein.

As well as offering admirable poise, the Fluence also serves up surprising acceleration. Floored at urban speeds, the 95bhp, 167lbft motor gives us a hefty shove in the back – sufficient to push ahead of ordinary traffic.

The motor, drive-shafts, battery charger, inverter, coolant pumps and radiator all live under the bonnet, helping to balance weight distribution. There’s not much of a gearbox – just one forward ratio while for reverse, the motor is simply run backwards.

Our car boasts air-conditioning, all-round electric windows and a very nice leather-rimmed wheel. Power assistance is electric, obviously, furnishing us with a light and rather tight-lipped helm. Visibility is good, marred only slightly at the rear by the rising waist and high rear deck.

The controls feel remarkably unremarkable. The gear selector simply offers park, reverse, neutral and drive, the handbrake is manual, throttle response is linear and predictable, and regenerative braking is unobtrusive and feels a lot like petrol-engine braking. From a standstill in D, forward creep is perhaps unusually strong, but otherwise the only clue to the electric powertrain is the pin-drop silence of its delivery. All you hear around town is tyre-on-road noise, a very faint, high-pitched whine under acceleration and – if you drop the window – the droning engines of other cars.

Start-up is a mundane affair – simply insert the key into its steering-column slot and twist. A little green car-shaped symbol on the dashboard informs you that all is well with the electrics. The instrument panel offers three dials – a sweep hand on the left gives battery charge from 1 to 0, the central clock is a large and clear speedometer, and finally to the right is a small dial marked “kW” that swings left or right depending on which of the two pedals you’re pressing and is, therefore, largely pointless. Above this swingometer sits the much more relevant trip computer, which can be set to show a variety of measures including the all-important range prediction.

At the start of our run the prediction said 67km. Fifteen minutes and 5.1km of Parisian cut-and-thrust later it said 62km, so it is at least consistent. It is probably pessimistic too, given that we made much greater power demands than we normally might as we tested the car’s urge away from the lights.

The Fluence is clearly a well-developed product from a major manufacturer and will be ready for the rigours of retail sale early next year – no argument. It’s probably not the right shape for Europe, though. Matthieu Tenenbaum, deputy director of Renault’s EV programme, is quite frank in his admission that the Fluence is better suited to the Israeli market where it will first go on sale (alongside Denmark) and where C-segment saloons dominate the market.

The saloon shape may appeal to fleet buyers, but in the European private sector Renault needs a compact hatchback to slot into the electric car’s most likely niche – the second-vehicle runabout for families that also own a bigger conventional car.

That’s not intended as a dismissive remark because it’s no small market – in the UK alone there are more than six million vehicles that share drive space with a larger sibling.

“The Renault Zoe will be the big seller here in Europe,” predicts Tenenbaum, referring to the Clio-sized electric car that is due in 2012. “Before it goes on sale we will have learned from the Fluence, and the Kangoo ZE van. It will be a better product as a result.”

Unlike Fluence, Zoe may prove to be a make-or-break car for Renault’s electric car ambitions. Stein and Renault’s engineers face a stiff challenge, however. Somehow, they must squeeze the same standardised, wheelie-bin-sized battery into a smaller bodyshell, also carry at least four adults, and then find some room for shopping under the hatch. Quarts and pint pots come to mind.

As revelatory as our drive in the Fluence ZE was, the Zoe will surely be even more of a surprise. We can’t wait.

With a bit of luck we’ll be driving the Renault Fluence ZE electric car in Paris in the coming week. We were wondering, in advance, how the Fluence might stack up against the Nissan Leaf (which we hope to drive later this year, having enjoyed a couple of brief stints in two Leaf mules).

Although Leaf and Fluence share a similar battery, made up of identical flat-laminate cells, they use different motors in different bodies. Surprisingly, the purpose-built Japanese Leaf is almost 200kg heavier than its French frère, which has to manage with a bodyshell adapted for both fossil-fuel and electric drivetrains.

The Leaf makes up for its lardier construction with a beefier motor, giving the two Alliance siblings identical power-to-weight ratios. The result is that the Fluence ZE and Leaf will probably feel similar to drive, but the Renault ought to have the edge in the real world.

As maverick car designer Gordon Murray recently told Autocar, while talking up his T27 electric city car project, weight is the enemy of battery-powered cars – as is excessive oomph. “The last thing you want for an efficient electric car is conventional construction or a sports car character,” Murray told the magazine, arguing that heft begets more heft. “Weight or the need for lots of acceleration means your battery has to be too heavy.” And a heavy battery is of course also a pricey battery.

It’s no surprise to learn that Murray’s upcoming T27 aims to be the lightest of proper (non-quadricycle) electric cars, although it may be a shock to see it trails most other EVs in power-to-weight ratio. The T27 will have fewer horses per kilo than even the family-sized Fluence. Murray’s electric midget will likely go round corners like it’s on rails, but away from the traffic lights it’s going to feel pretty sluggish.

Here’s how some current and planned EVs stack up: