Is a Hummer cleaner than a Prius?

You’ve often heard it, be you an ordinary “joe-soap” king, queen or pope; we are all only dust and it’s to dust we’ll go. A recent report, in the USA, came up with a hypothesis on the great hybrid versus petrol car debate on a dust to dust premise. Before you go any further I must remind you of how great they are at producing report after report. I sometimes wonder if anyone, least of all themselves, listens. Sure, aren’t they great ones for rubbishing what they don’t agree with and promoting what they support on the sometimes flimsiest of evidence. Anyway, I digress.

A report produced by CNW Marketing Research in Bandon, Oregon looked at the dust to dust costs between the favoured Hollywood transport, the Toyota Prius and the vehicle of choice by the Terminator, aka Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Hummer Jeep – very familiar to military enthusiasts and fans of CSI Miami.

Much of the current debate centres on the fuel efficiency of the hybrid against the more mainstream petrol or diesel equivalents. The CNW report looks at the total costs from creation to destruction of a number of vehicles and proposes that the Hummer (H3) is cheaper, costing USD$1.31 cents per mile less to run than the Toyota Prius. While it is a headliner grabber it doesn’t tell the full story. For instance, the costs are based on the H3 having a service life of over 200,000 miles and the Prius only 100,000 miles – hardly a fair comparison.

While, as in any report, we can always find reason to reject its findings it does open up discussion on the whole total cost of the products we buy. We tend to focus on the energy implications of the product whilst in our tenure, mainly the fuel costs but also the service and maintenance expense.

When rating the energy consumption of an individual, group, community, or country, scientists talk about a “carbon footprint”. That is how much carbon will be emitted into the atmosphere, directly or indirectly, through the usage of products and services. How big is your footprint?

Do we give enough thought to the energy consumed in the production and transportation of our finished goods? How “Green” is the organic lettuce in your local shop? It may have been grown on the Continent and being flown/driven to the shop. Compare the energy usage to do that compared to the product grown locally, even if an amount of energy was used to heat the glasshouse.

I’m not about to start on a crusade promoting hybrid vs petrol vs hydrogen vs electric cars as they all have their merits and this is certainly no ad for the Green party. We must, though, challenge manufacturers to produce products that we can continue to enjoy and yet minimise the environmental impact. None of us will easily surrender the freedom, independence, convenience, and the satisfied smile that the car brings.

Whoa! You’re driving like we do—more, matter of fact, some pretty heavy mileage there.

We would put the mileage like I told you and then I would sell the vehicle locally, clean them up nice, have them serviced one more time and then darn if we wouldn’t see them for several years afterwards, no telling how many miles those cars stacked up. They were usually poor folks looking for something they could afford that had been treated right, regardless of miles.

All we do is make sure oil is changed regularly and small things taken care of before they develop into big problems.

About a year ago or so, Popular Mechanics had interesting articles on cars with 250,000+ miles without major repairs, shoulda saved it, very interesting...

Fair? What's unfair about it? Do you, dear author, claim that all vehicles have the same service life? The fact

Oops! You misspelled "fantasy."

that the Hummer will last twice as long, in miles, as the Prius is precisely the issue!

No, not all cars have the same service life. Toyotas last a lot longer than GMs.

100,000 miles is just the warranty for the Prius' batteries. Hummers have the same length powertrain warranty. Did you click your ruby slippers together and land in a world where Toyotas break right after the warranty expires, but GMs last two or three times as long?

This piece has been thoroughly discredited on this forum several times and keeps reappearing. I'm wondering if it was written by someone at DU to make conservatives look bad.

Just to clarify, I meant the original piece comparing the “real” cost of the Hummer and Prius keeps reappearing. Not this one, which is more intelligently written and only references the original one.

Toyotas last a lot longer than GMs.

Irrelevant.

Does the Toyota Prius last longer than the Hummer H2?

I don't think so.

Overall reliability of the make is an pretty good indicator of how long the car will last. Remember, the batteries aren't the entire car. If the article had demonstrated that hybrid batteries drop dead, beyond repair, the moment the warranty expires (which of course it didn't even attempt to do, since there are no data out there to contradict Toyota's expectation that it will last 15 years) it's a similar cost to replacing an engine. Not at all the same as scrapping the car completely.

Your question, however, really is irrelevant. The ridiculous original per-mile cost numbers aren't based on the Hummer simply lasting "longer than" the Prius; they're based on it lasting 3x as long. If the Hummer lasts twice as long -- a claim for which no one on earth has any precedent -- the numbers still wouldn't add up. Maybe the Hummer can gain some efficiency by carrying more people per mile. I sure don't see that actually happening on the roads.

Full disclosure: I've never been in a Prius or a Hummer. My guess is they're both overrated, but it's just a guess.

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