Buying a hybrid to save the enviroment? Think again.
 

https://www.reason.org/commentaries/d...20060719.shtml

The major factor for that is that they used a life cycle for the Prius at 100,000 miles and the Hummer 300,000 miles. It would be interesting to see the actual number of mile before they go to the boneyard. The US auto makers will be flashing this information around. Go hug a Hummer and thank the driver for saving the environment.:rolleyes:

You make an excellent point. I do wonder what the real lifespan of a hybrid is. I DO know that that batteries (at least in the insight) start going out after around 100k, but I have serious doubts that:

1) Toyota, who (like Honda) has historically had cars that last for over 200k before having ANY problems,would produce a car that only gives 100k miles.
2) GM, who historically has a car that can last for around 100k can suddenly produce a car that can last 300k.

What I believe we have here is a clash of cultures. The Eastern culture (Japanese - Toyota) will give you a lower number than they really expect. American culter (GM) always overcompensates for smaller sales. :eek:

Would the Hummer last 100k and Prius 300k instead, we could all agree what the real toxic energy hog was.

I've heard this same argument used to discredit the pure EV. The person making the arguement often never acknowledges how long an electric drive system will actually last, 500,000-1,000,000+ miles.

The batteries on the Prius are NiMH. They're actually holding out quite well, even after 250,000 miles in a few examples on Yahoo Groups. There are examples of RAV4 EVs passing the 150,000 mile mark with no degredation in capacity or performance yet.

This battery would outlast most internal combustion engines in a hybrid or pure EV, perhaps even twice over. Chevron Texaco has that patent now and prevents large EV-suitable batteries from being produced and sold to small companies and hobbyists.

let a computer handle a battery that is programmed for long life = good results

let a human handle a battery = its dead before one knows it

that is why humans are not in charge of the battery while driving the car. Toyota claims the battery WILL last the lifetime of the veichle but there are a few cases where the battery poops on you.

Examples: https://hybridcars.com/hidden-costs.html

in the end, just treat the battery like your children and nothing will go wrong! those who DO run into battery problems its just how they drove the car (super agressive driving?) and where its parked (aka in the sun for long periods of time?)

remember batteries are humans, they like to feel what we are feeling too!

I hear this argument against US auto-makers constantly.

I just sold my 1991 chevy s-10 truck on Monday. Mileage at time of sale was 301,501 on original engine and auto tranny. Ran well enough that untill i bought my new car i was running it 70+ miles a day.

My position is that if a vehicle is maintained properly, and driven with care, there is no reason that the vehicle should not be able to surpass 200,000.

This leads my logic to two possible conclusions, both of wich can be easily proven or disproven in certain cases.

1) Foreign cars are better maintained than domestics
2) Domestics are driven under more sever conditions.

I'm not saying by any stretch that US vehicles are as well built as Foriegn cars (i DID buy a toyota), but i feel something is amiss if one vehicle can ONLY achieve 100K and the other can achieve 300K

What I've experienced with domestics vs. foriegn cars:

1. A family friend owns an s10 with 600k on it.
2. There are quite a few million mile civics that I've heard of an people routinely turbo, supercharge, and run nitrous on 200k plus civic engines with no issues.
3. Guy I worked with was drunk driving his prelude with no oil in it (he forgot to put the bolt in, cuz he was drunk) at 80-100 mph for 1:30 or so and the engine ran fine once he realized what he did and put some oil in the car.
4. All the mechanics I worked will said that domestics are not built to last, in fact, that no cars were anymore. Except, they said, for hondas and toyotas. They said this with regret, because they only drove domestics, but after working on thousands over cars over a few decades this is what they learned based on the problems they saw.

My friend just bought a used 2005 Prius and loves it - haven't measured the internal EMR yet but that is on the list - replacement battery is $2000 she says.

What I like about the report is that the SCION XB was the lowest cost dust to dust HA HA !! I LOVE IT!!! and I lowered my operating cost with higher MPG and Synlube!!!

Right on, chesspirate.
If anyone thinks differently, they could go work at any private auto auction facility in the country and easily see the light on this subject.

Except around here where you die of old age trying to drive that many miles on these 25-35 mph roads and that's if the car doesn't rust out from under you before then.
I may get my Geo into my driveway at home if my brother decides to remove one of the 3 wrecks sitting there for over 12 years to make room for it - then we will rebuild from scratch the horn for the front right suspension. Registration runs out this month - inspection last month.

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.

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.

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.

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.:)

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.

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! :D ).

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.

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.