Buying a hybrid to save the enviroment? Think again.

[vegasjetskier]

I think it's kind of pointless to include engineering costs and employee travel miles and costs into this analysis. Yes, it cost something for that. But that has already been spent and paid for. So to say I shouldn't buy one because of that cost is incorrect. If you're looking at it globally, it may be relevant, but for the individual buyer it's not.

[ketel0ne]

This may be a little tongue in cheek, but wouldn't GM's employee costs be lower than Toyota's with all of their layoffs and cut retirement plans and forced early retirement buyouts? If Toyota has a larger workforce and better longer benefits that would also play into it.

Finally if the data includes the delphi piece of GM before the "split" of profit centers that could be a factor the other way.

Data can be used to tell what ever story one wants to present, the more abstract and loosely connected data points the harder someone is trying to prove their arguement.

This is somewhat how tastes test were done in the 80's and 90's coke and pepsi just grew or shrunk sample sizes to get to the results they needed. You never heard that 9 out of 10 people in the lower left corner of South Dakota thought Coke tasted better. It was 9 out of 10 Americans, or soda drinkers.

[kickflipjr]

I world rather not get a hybrid. Poblems I have with hybrids are:

-Cost. They have a higher upfront cost. It would take thousands of miles of very good mpg to make up the price difference of an echo vs. a prius.

-The battery issue does worry me a bit. I have heard of insight owners having problems.

-hybrid suvs/trucks that are labled "green". And get like 20mpg.

-Harder to work on.

[philmcneal]

i like hybrids because i can drive in the city and knowing i'm getting the best bang for my buck!

even if my buck is spent to get the car in the first place, at least the car itself is nice!

there are other cool things too i like about the prius, like using it as a generator, stealth mode, smooth and relaxing ride, i don't have to freak out if i'm stuck in traffic ect...

[zpiloto]

Originally Posted by philmcneal

i like hybrids because i can drive in the city and knowing i'm getting the best bang for my buck!

even if my buck is spent to get the car in the first place, at least the car itself is nice!

there are other cool things too i like about the prius, like using it as a generator, stealth mode, smooth and relaxing ride, i don't have to freak out if i'm stuck in traffic ect...

If you don't mind why don't you post the prius in the garage I be interested in it's stats.

[GasSavers_Randy]

This is an extremely bad report. The figures given have no possible basis in reality. Forget hybrids... they say, for example, that a normal Civic uses $2.42 in energy per mile. How exactly can you use several times the cost per mile in energy alone?

Lets do a quick calculation here. They say the fleet average is $2.281 a mile in energy. They say they used $3 per gallon as the price of gas, so lets just convert that to BTUs (115k per gallon-> 87k/mile). This should be about the most expensive form of energy available, so this should be below the actual amount of energy. Total US car and light truck fleet mileage was about 2.7 trillion miles in 2004. So we're using a minimum of 230 quads (10^15 btus) to power the US residential fleet. The US used 100 total from all sources for all uses. So our cars use more than twice the total amount of energy we use. NOT.

This type of completely bogus energy estimate is pretty common, and as far as I can tell, it's always political. For example estimates of energy used to mine uranium that end up greater than the amount for the country it's in. Basically they add up the same energy over and over from different directions. They say they used 4000 sources, so there's lots of room for overlap.

[vegasjetskier]

What they're talking about in the report is the "dust-to-dust" energy needed to plan, build, drive, and then dispose of the vehicle, not just the cost/mile to drive it. It takes a lot of energy to build a vehicle - metal smelting, plastics forming, lights and A/C for the factory, etc. I don't necessarily agree with their conclusions either, but the energy cost of a new vehicle is a lot higher than a lot of people realize (that's why some people say you should recycle your old car by converting it into an EV. Yeah! ).

Originally Posted by Randy

This is an extremely bad report. The figures given have no possible basis in reality. Forget hybrids... they say, for example, that a normal Civic uses $2.42 in energy per mile. How exactly can you use several times the cost per mile in energy alone?

Lets do a quick calculation here. They say the fleet average is $2.281 a mile in energy. They say they used $3 per gallon as the price of gas, so lets just convert that to BTUs (115k per gallon-> 87k/mile). This should be about the most expensive form of energy available, so this should be below the actual amount of energy. Total US car and light truck fleet mileage was about 2.7 trillion miles in 2004. So we're using a minimum of 230 quads (10^15 btus) to power the US residential fleet. The US used 100 total from all sources for all uses. So our cars use more than twice the total amount of energy we use. NOT.

This type of completely bogus energy estimate is pretty common, and as far as I can tell, it's always political. For example estimates of energy used to mine uranium that end up greater than the amount for the country it's in. Basically they add up the same energy over and over from different directions. They say they used 4000 sources, so there's lots of room for overlap.

[JanGeo]

More importantly the harder it is to take apart and separate the materials that it is constructed with the more costly it becomes also when recycling it. THe xB for instance comes apart really easy - the entire dash can come off with a few screws and the wiring is really neat and tidy and easy to pull apart. Most of the interior just snaps in place in a certain order. Take a Prius Hybrid and good luck taking the drive train apart.

[GasSavers_Randy]

Originally Posted by vegasjetskier

What they're talking about in the report is the "dust-to-dust" energy needed to plan, build, drive, and then dispose of the vehicle, not just the cost/mile to drive it. It takes a lot of energy to build a vehicle - metal smelting, plastics forming, lights and A/C for the factory, etc.

I do agree that cars use more energy than they burn as gas. But it's got to be limited by the total spent. This is a really simple concept. If I spend a dollar on the cheapest type of energy available, then anything else I buy with that dollar has to have used less energy.

There's no free energy, at least in industrial quantities. They're paying something to smelt the metal, form the plastics and light the factory. They already listed out every possible thing, then added them up, and they did it in the form of money, which means they're really interested in the outcome.

OK, they can lose money, or get subsidized. But it's limited by those amounts. This report clearly goes well past that because it reports more energy for cars than we use for everything.