Posted on 06/11/2007 7:45:55 PM PDT by Valin
Interesting news coming out of the Central Connecticut State University paper:
The Toyota Prius has become the flagship car for those in our society so environmentally conscious that they are willing to spend a premium to show the world how much they care. Unfortunately for them, their ultimate ‘green car’ is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America; it takes more combined energy per Prius to produce than a Hummer.
... When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer - the Prius’s arch nemesis.
We know one thing the Prius does is increase the amount of “smug.”
It just won’t die.
This article is starting to look a bit perennial...
March 14, 2007: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1803723/posts
March 20, 2007: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1800912/posts
May 4, 2007: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1828450/posts
Blasphemy!
Note that the environmental damage for steel production is not tallied, nor a number of other things.
And how does the original author (two clicks away) assume that all the Pious nickel comes from Ontario?
So my NiMH laptop batteries are also evil?
I think most anti- hybrid auto complaints are mostly due to Smug, and the Pious is the best, most visible example of Smug.
I have an Escape with a V6 and my coworker has the hybrid version.
I’m half way to the freeway before he even gets out of the parking lot.
It’s a dog.
The local Ford dealer here refuses to handle them at all because he doesn’t want to piss off his customers.
If it was run every day it’d still be funny...
Aside from all of that, the Prius is an eyesore. Does making the car so freakishly ugly add to fuel economy? Or is it like, “if it tastes bad it must be good for you” type thing?
The nickel mined for batteries has created a giant toxic area in Canada.
That material is shipped to China for processing into battery-grade material (mailing tons of earthly metals across the Pacific Ocean isn’t cheap, by the way).
The batteries are made in Japan.
Then it’s shipped back to North America to be installed in the Prius, to be purchased by preachy liberals who have never heard of Sudbury, Ontario, and will never know how their actions have ruined it.
Not as ugly as the Honda Insight, that brightly painted suppository on wheels.
“Aside from all of that, the Prius is an eyesore.”
I hear that! Yup, my least favorite auto. A Gremlin is better looking.
Soon, they will remove the side mirrors and replace the rear view with “tiny cameras”, to improve drag. I don’t think it will improve appearances much, and everyone is pretty much used to side mirrors by now.
Not true. The degraded environment around Sudbury occurred long before nickel based batteries ever became commerical. The modern operations there are very different, since before nickel battteries become popular.
Sudbury was widely, although not entirely accurately, known for many years as a wasteland. In parts of the city, vegetation was devastated, both by acid rain and by logging to provide fuel for early smelting techniques, as well as wood for the reconstruction of Chicago after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The resulting erosion exposed bedrock, which was charred in most places to a pitted, dark black appearance. There was not a complete lack of vegetation in the region, however. Paper birch and wild blueberry are notable examples of plants which thrived in the acidic soils, and even during the worst years of the city's environmental damage, not all parts of the city were equally affected.
During the Apollo manned lunar exploration program, NASA astronauts trained in Sudbury, to become familiar with shatter cones, a rare rock formation connected with meteorite impacts. However, the popular misconception that they were visiting Sudbury because it purportedly resembled the lifeless surface of the moon dogged the city for years.
In the late 1970s, private, public, and commercial interests combined to establish an unprecedented "regreening" effort. Lime was spread over the charred soil of the Sudbury region by hand and by aircraft. Seeds of wild grasses and other vegetation were also spread. In twenty years, over three million trees were planted.
I don’t think I’ve seen one of those but whenever I get behind a Prius, I think I’m behind a car that’s been severely rear-ended
I like my story better.
I lane-split past a few of ‘em that were sitting in bumper-to-bumper Bay Area rush-hour traffic, getting better gas mileage than they were on my Honda Nighthawk 550.
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