Will putting a "hybrid" sticker on keep the greenies off your back?
05-19-2008, 10:35 PM
#21
This has always been my contention. If oil is made up from dead animals and such decomposing, then it stands to reason that it's a VERY renewable resource, no? I wouldn't think dead dinosaurs wouldn't have the monopoly on the oil makin.
Last edited by RedneckJeep; 05-19-2008 at 11:07 PM.
05-19-2008, 11:26 PM
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05-20-2008, 04:38 AM
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People, I have a Jeep JK (second jeep) and a Prius. Some of the stuff that you read (and has been repeated on this thread) is pure BS. Kinda like talking to a democrat or republican....the story twist depends on who you are talking to. The basic fact is that the Prius is a great car that is not going to cost tons of money to replace the batteries and is not going to trash the earth with its battery waste or vehicle production methods. If more of use had them perhaps the Arabs and US oil cartel would not be sticking it to us at $4.00 gallon. Then we could fill up our jeeps for $25.00 instead of $60.00. The problem is that the tree huggers take it too far and the anti-tree huggers take it too far the other way. The Prius is a great car for what is is supposed to do. I have driven 600 miles on one tank of gas (10 gallons!!!). Your not going to go off road, pull your boat or any of the other things it was not intended to do. The really sad thing is that the Prius is in its third generation and is still the most advanced car in the world and yet our own auto makers have not come close to matching it. It has not been that long that the rest of the world would buy american because it was built to last forever. Now everything is made in China and most of our economy is based on the service industry. ....ahh....did I get off track? : )
05-20-2008, 05:36 AM
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People, I have a Jeep JK (second jeep) and a Prius. Some of the stuff that you read (and has been repeated on this thread) is pure BS. Kinda like talking to a democrat or republican....the story twist depends on who you are talking to. The basic fact is that the Prius is a great car that is not going to cost tons of money to replace the batteries and is not going to trash the earth with its battery waste or vehicle production methods. If more of use had them perhaps the Arabs and US oil cartel would not be sticking it to us at $4.00 gallon. Then we could fill up our jeeps for $25.00 instead of $60.00. The problem is that the tree huggers take it too far and the anti-tree huggers take it too far the other way. The Prius is a great car for what is is supposed to do. I have driven 600 miles on one tank of gas (10 gallons!!!). Your not going to go off road, pull your boat or any of the other things it was not intended to do. The really sad thing is that the Prius is in its third generation and is still the most advanced car in the world and yet our own auto makers have not come close to matching it. It has not been that long that the rest of the world would buy american because it was built to last forever. Now everything is made in China and most of our economy is based on the service industry. ....ahh....did I get off track? : )
Hidden cost of driving a Prius
Totaling all the energy expended, from design to junkyard, a Hummer may be a better bargain.
By James L. Martin
When it comes to protecting the environment, senior citizens should concentrate more on
the total energy consumed in building and operating a car than its fuel efficiency - no
matter how impressive the statistics appear on the window sticker at the showroom.
A prime example is Toyota's Prius, a compact hybrid that's beloved by ardent
environmentalists and that fetches premium prices because it gets nearly 50 miles-pergallon
in combined highway/city driving.
Yet, new data have emerged that show the Prius may not be quite as eco-friendly as first
assumed - if you pencil in the environmental negatives of producing it in the first place.
Like most hybrids, the Prius relies on two engines - one, a conventional 76-horsepower
gasoline power plant, and a second, battery-powered, that kicks in 67 more horses. Most
of the gas is consumed as the car goes from 0 to 30, according to alarmed Canadian
environmentalists, who say Toyota's touting of the car's green appeal leaves out a few
pertinent and disturbing facts.
The nickel for the battery, for instance, is mined in Sudbury, Ontario, and smelted at
nearby Nickel Centre, just north of the province's massive Georgian Bay.
Toyota buys about 1,000 tons of nickel from the facility each year, ships the nickel to
Wales for refining, then to China, where it's manufactured into nickel foam, and then
onto Toyota's battery plant in Japan.
That alone creates a globe-trotting trail of carbon emissions that ought to seriously
concern everyone involved in the fight against global warming. All told, the start-tofinish
journey travels more than 10,000 miles - mostly by container ship, but also by
diesel locomotive.
But it's not just the clouds of greenhouse gases generated by all that smelting, refining,
manufacturing and transporting that worries green activists. The 1,250-foot-tall
smokestack that spews huge puffs of sulphur dioxide at the Sudbury mine and smelter
operation has left a large swath of the surrounding area looking like a surrealistic scene
from the depths of hell.
On the perimeter of the area, skeletons of trees and bushes stand like ghostly sentinels
guarding a sprawling wasteland. Astronauts in training for NASA actually have practiced
driving moon buggies on the suburban Sudbury tract because it's considered a duplicate
of the Moon's landscape.
"The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants, and the soil slid
down off the hillside," David Martin, Greenpeace's energy coordinator in Canada, told
the London Daily Mail.
"The solution they came up with was the Superstack. The idea was to dilute pollution, but
all it did was spread the fallout across northern Ontario," Martin told the British
newspaper, adding that Sudbury remains "a major environmental and health problem.
The environmental cost of producing that car battery is pretty high."
A "Dust to Dust" study by CNW Marketing Research of Bandon, Ore., shows the overall
eco-costs of automotive hybrids may be even higher.
Released last December, the study tabulated all data on the energy necessary to plan,
build, sell, drive and dispose of a vehicle from drawing board to junkyard, including such
items as plant-to-dealer fuel costs, distances driven, electricity usage per pound of
material in each vehicle, and hundreds of other variables.
To put the data into understandable terms for consumers, CNW translated it into a
"dollars per lifetime mile" figure, or the energy cost per mile driven. When looked at
from that perspective, the Prius and other hybrids quickly morphed from fuel-sippers into
energy-guzzlers.
The Prius registered an energy-cost average of $3.25 per mile driven over its expected
life span of 100,000 miles. Ironically, a Hummer, the brooding giant that has become the
bête noir of the green movement, did much better, with an energy-cost average of $1.95
over its expected life span of 300,000 miles. And its crash protection makes it far safer
than the tiny Prius.
Such information should be of major concern to senior citizens - especially those on a
fixed budget.
If seniors need a small gas-sipping car for city travel, however, the undisputed champion
is Toyota's own gasoline-powered subcompact, the Scion xB, whose energy cost
averaged a negligible 48 cents for each mile traveled over its lifetime.
Fully armed with all the facts, seniors may want to zip down to their nearest Toyota
dealer and trade in their Priuses for Scion xBs. That would be the equivalent of reducing
their energy footprint from a size 24D to about a size 5A. In the case of global warming,
one small step for man may turn out to be a giant leap for mankind.
05-20-2008, 05:50 AM
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05-20-2008, 06:34 AM
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The batteries take about as much room as the batteries that will be used in the normal life of a normal vehicle. These are small units that look like a bunch of D cell batteries. They are not big industrial batteries such that those from one car will fill a landfill. These batteries will be disposed of the same as all the other batteries in use today.....the batteries from toys far exceed the waste produced by these cars. Mine is a 2006 with 50,000 miles. When it dies....it gets its own burial plot and headstone.
05-20-2008, 06:36 AM
#29
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Hidden cost of driving a Prius
Totaling all the energy expended, from design to junkyard, a Hummer may be a better bargain.
By James L. Martin
When it comes to protecting the environment, senior citizens should concentrate more on
the total energy consumed in building and operating a car than its fuel efficiency - no
matter how impressive the statistics appear on the window sticker at the showroom.
A prime example is Toyota's Prius, a compact hybrid that's beloved by ardent
environmentalists and that fetches premium prices because it gets nearly 50 miles-pergallon
in combined highway/city driving.
Yet, new data have emerged that show the Prius may not be quite as eco-friendly as first
assumed - if you pencil in the environmental negatives of producing it in the first place.
Like most hybrids, the Prius relies on two engines - one, a conventional 76-horsepower
gasoline power plant, and a second, battery-powered, that kicks in 67 more horses. Most
of the gas is consumed as the car goes from 0 to 30, according to alarmed Canadian
environmentalists, who say Toyota's touting of the car's green appeal leaves out a few
pertinent and disturbing facts.
The nickel for the battery, for instance, is mined in Sudbury, Ontario, and smelted at
nearby Nickel Centre, just north of the province's massive Georgian Bay.
Toyota buys about 1,000 tons of nickel from the facility each year, ships the nickel to
Wales for refining, then to China, where it's manufactured into nickel foam, and then
onto Toyota's battery plant in Japan.
That alone creates a globe-trotting trail of carbon emissions that ought to seriously
concern everyone involved in the fight against global warming. All told, the start-tofinish
journey travels more than 10,000 miles - mostly by container ship, but also by
diesel locomotive.
But it's not just the clouds of greenhouse gases generated by all that smelting, refining,
manufacturing and transporting that worries green activists. The 1,250-foot-tall
smokestack that spews huge puffs of sulphur dioxide at the Sudbury mine and smelter
operation has left a large swath of the surrounding area looking like a surrealistic scene
from the depths of hell.
On the perimeter of the area, skeletons of trees and bushes stand like ghostly sentinels
guarding a sprawling wasteland. Astronauts in training for NASA actually have practiced
driving moon buggies on the suburban Sudbury tract because it's considered a duplicate
of the Moon's landscape.
"The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants, and the soil slid
down off the hillside," David Martin, Greenpeace's energy coordinator in Canada, told
the London Daily Mail.
"The solution they came up with was the Superstack. The idea was to dilute pollution, but
all it did was spread the fallout across northern Ontario," Martin told the British
newspaper, adding that Sudbury remains "a major environmental and health problem.
The environmental cost of producing that car battery is pretty high."
A "Dust to Dust" study by CNW Marketing Research of Bandon, Ore., shows the overall
eco-costs of automotive hybrids may be even higher.
Released last December, the study tabulated all data on the energy necessary to plan,
build, sell, drive and dispose of a vehicle from drawing board to junkyard, including such
items as plant-to-dealer fuel costs, distances driven, electricity usage per pound of
material in each vehicle, and hundreds of other variables.
To put the data into understandable terms for consumers, CNW translated it into a
"dollars per lifetime mile" figure, or the energy cost per mile driven. When looked at
from that perspective, the Prius and other hybrids quickly morphed from fuel-sippers into
energy-guzzlers.
The Prius registered an energy-cost average of $3.25 per mile driven over its expected
life span of 100,000 miles. Ironically, a Hummer, the brooding giant that has become the
bête noir of the green movement, did much better, with an energy-cost average of $1.95
over its expected life span of 300,000 miles. And its crash protection makes it far safer
than the tiny Prius.
Such information should be of major concern to senior citizens - especially those on a
fixed budget.
If seniors need a small gas-sipping car for city travel, however, the undisputed champion
is Toyota's own gasoline-powered subcompact, the Scion xB, whose energy cost
averaged a negligible 48 cents for each mile traveled over its lifetime.
Fully armed with all the facts, seniors may want to zip down to their nearest Toyota
dealer and trade in their Priuses for Scion xBs. That would be the equivalent of reducing
their energy footprint from a size 24D to about a size 5A. In the case of global warming,
one small step for man may turn out to be a giant leap for mankind.
Totaling all the energy expended, from design to junkyard, a Hummer may be a better bargain.
By James L. Martin
When it comes to protecting the environment, senior citizens should concentrate more on
the total energy consumed in building and operating a car than its fuel efficiency - no
matter how impressive the statistics appear on the window sticker at the showroom.
A prime example is Toyota's Prius, a compact hybrid that's beloved by ardent
environmentalists and that fetches premium prices because it gets nearly 50 miles-pergallon
in combined highway/city driving.
Yet, new data have emerged that show the Prius may not be quite as eco-friendly as first
assumed - if you pencil in the environmental negatives of producing it in the first place.
Like most hybrids, the Prius relies on two engines - one, a conventional 76-horsepower
gasoline power plant, and a second, battery-powered, that kicks in 67 more horses. Most
of the gas is consumed as the car goes from 0 to 30, according to alarmed Canadian
environmentalists, who say Toyota's touting of the car's green appeal leaves out a few
pertinent and disturbing facts.
The nickel for the battery, for instance, is mined in Sudbury, Ontario, and smelted at
nearby Nickel Centre, just north of the province's massive Georgian Bay.
Toyota buys about 1,000 tons of nickel from the facility each year, ships the nickel to
Wales for refining, then to China, where it's manufactured into nickel foam, and then
onto Toyota's battery plant in Japan.
That alone creates a globe-trotting trail of carbon emissions that ought to seriously
concern everyone involved in the fight against global warming. All told, the start-tofinish
journey travels more than 10,000 miles - mostly by container ship, but also by
diesel locomotive.
But it's not just the clouds of greenhouse gases generated by all that smelting, refining,
manufacturing and transporting that worries green activists. The 1,250-foot-tall
smokestack that spews huge puffs of sulphur dioxide at the Sudbury mine and smelter
operation has left a large swath of the surrounding area looking like a surrealistic scene
from the depths of hell.
On the perimeter of the area, skeletons of trees and bushes stand like ghostly sentinels
guarding a sprawling wasteland. Astronauts in training for NASA actually have practiced
driving moon buggies on the suburban Sudbury tract because it's considered a duplicate
of the Moon's landscape.
"The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants, and the soil slid
down off the hillside," David Martin, Greenpeace's energy coordinator in Canada, told
the London Daily Mail.
"The solution they came up with was the Superstack. The idea was to dilute pollution, but
all it did was spread the fallout across northern Ontario," Martin told the British
newspaper, adding that Sudbury remains "a major environmental and health problem.
The environmental cost of producing that car battery is pretty high."
A "Dust to Dust" study by CNW Marketing Research of Bandon, Ore., shows the overall
eco-costs of automotive hybrids may be even higher.
Released last December, the study tabulated all data on the energy necessary to plan,
build, sell, drive and dispose of a vehicle from drawing board to junkyard, including such
items as plant-to-dealer fuel costs, distances driven, electricity usage per pound of
material in each vehicle, and hundreds of other variables.
To put the data into understandable terms for consumers, CNW translated it into a
"dollars per lifetime mile" figure, or the energy cost per mile driven. When looked at
from that perspective, the Prius and other hybrids quickly morphed from fuel-sippers into
energy-guzzlers.
The Prius registered an energy-cost average of $3.25 per mile driven over its expected
life span of 100,000 miles. Ironically, a Hummer, the brooding giant that has become the
bête noir of the green movement, did much better, with an energy-cost average of $1.95
over its expected life span of 300,000 miles. And its crash protection makes it far safer
than the tiny Prius.
Such information should be of major concern to senior citizens - especially those on a
fixed budget.
If seniors need a small gas-sipping car for city travel, however, the undisputed champion
is Toyota's own gasoline-powered subcompact, the Scion xB, whose energy cost
averaged a negligible 48 cents for each mile traveled over its lifetime.
Fully armed with all the facts, seniors may want to zip down to their nearest Toyota
dealer and trade in their Priuses for Scion xBs. That would be the equivalent of reducing
their energy footprint from a size 24D to about a size 5A. In the case of global warming,
one small step for man may turn out to be a giant leap for mankind.
05-20-2008, 07:05 AM
#30
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One Quote stated: So, which is more financially sound, gasoline or battery power? At $1000 for the battery and a lifespan of eight years or longer, the battery clearly wins any contest of the calculators. At a worst case of $3500 for a new battery pack, installed, along with $1.65 per gallon of gasoline, we find the battery pack is worth 2121 gallons of gasoline. Our Road Test Summary rates the (first-generation) Prius at 40.3 mpg, which would yield 85,476 miles of driving. That would be a bit over 4 cents a mile for the battery, and a financial dead heat given 10,684 miles per year of driving in eight years. Adding even a little to battery life or subtracting from its cost makes the battery a winner; and that’s not to mention any change in the price of gasoline, which is only going to go up.
A BC Government report stated:
"The Prius battery (and the battery-power management system) has been designed to maximize battery life. In part this is done by keeping the battery at an optimum charge level - never fully draining it and never fully recharging it. As a result, the Prius battery leads a pretty easy life. We have lab data showing the equivalent of 180,000 miles with no deterioration and expect it to last the life of the vehicle. We also expect battery technology to continue to improve: the second-generation model battery is 15% smaller, 25% lighter, and has 35% more specific power than the first. This is true of price as well. Between the 2003 and 2004 models, service battery costs came down 36% and we expect them to continue to drop so that by the time replacements may be needed it won't be a much of an issue. Since the car went on sale in 2000, Toyota has not replaced a single battery for wear and tear.”
In the future if a battery needs replacement out of warranty, it is likely to be replaced either with a new battery pack or with a reconditioned/overhauled unit. A new industry may arise that is similar to automatic transmissions where the battery is replaced with a rebuilt unit, then the removed pack would go for re-building. This will result in a lower replacement cost for hybrid vehicle owners.
Another report stated:
“The Prius batteries don't weigh much more than the lead acid battery on the Hummer. They come in at 80 pounds or so. Also, the nickel and other "rare earth" metals in the battery are 80-99% recyclable. We have the same recycling problem with all the lead-acid batteries from decommissioned normal cars today that we will have with hybrids as they age. I read a paper that claimed recycling the NMH batteries was easier and less energy intensive than the lead acid batteries.”
Like I said earlier.....depends on which side you are on as to what you believe. I am on both sides as I have the hybrid and the jeep (and the Mitishibishi eclipse and the Scion TC and the Honda Civic and the Ford Sporttrac and a riding mower.......). I like the riding mower the best!
A BC Government report stated:
"The Prius battery (and the battery-power management system) has been designed to maximize battery life. In part this is done by keeping the battery at an optimum charge level - never fully draining it and never fully recharging it. As a result, the Prius battery leads a pretty easy life. We have lab data showing the equivalent of 180,000 miles with no deterioration and expect it to last the life of the vehicle. We also expect battery technology to continue to improve: the second-generation model battery is 15% smaller, 25% lighter, and has 35% more specific power than the first. This is true of price as well. Between the 2003 and 2004 models, service battery costs came down 36% and we expect them to continue to drop so that by the time replacements may be needed it won't be a much of an issue. Since the car went on sale in 2000, Toyota has not replaced a single battery for wear and tear.”
In the future if a battery needs replacement out of warranty, it is likely to be replaced either with a new battery pack or with a reconditioned/overhauled unit. A new industry may arise that is similar to automatic transmissions where the battery is replaced with a rebuilt unit, then the removed pack would go for re-building. This will result in a lower replacement cost for hybrid vehicle owners.
Another report stated:
“The Prius batteries don't weigh much more than the lead acid battery on the Hummer. They come in at 80 pounds or so. Also, the nickel and other "rare earth" metals in the battery are 80-99% recyclable. We have the same recycling problem with all the lead-acid batteries from decommissioned normal cars today that we will have with hybrids as they age. I read a paper that claimed recycling the NMH batteries was easier and less energy intensive than the lead acid batteries.”
Like I said earlier.....depends on which side you are on as to what you believe. I am on both sides as I have the hybrid and the jeep (and the Mitishibishi eclipse and the Scion TC and the Honda Civic and the Ford Sporttrac and a riding mower.......). I like the riding mower the best!