Subject to Change

H/T: Mitchieville

When it comes to hybrid cars, I’ve always suspected that there was more than meets the eye. My biggest concern was that hybrids were being given a free pass on emissions tests. Knowing only what the glossy brochures say about the technology was enough to make me wonder if hybrid cars could be designed to look great on a standard emissions test, yet perform poorly under real world driving conditions. Now, there’s an answer to that question, and more!

According to The Recorder, the gas mileage pay-off may not be worth the price of the vehicle if you drive your Prius like a man.

You would be right if you went by the old government EPA estimates, which netted the Prius an incredible 60 miles per gallon in the city and 51 miles per gallon on the highway. Unfortunately for Toyota, the government realized how unrealistic their EPA tests were, which consisted of highway speeds limited to 55mph and acceleration of only 3.3 mph per second. The new tests which affect all 2008 models give a much more realistic rating with highway speeds of 80mph and acceleration of 8mph per second. This has dropped the Prius’s EPA down by 25 percent to an average of 45mpg. This now puts the Toyota within spitting distance of cars like the Chevy Aveo, which costs less then half what the Prius costs.

Translation:you can buy grandma the Prius, but put your lead-foot teenagers into something cheaper. 

When you compare what comes out of the tail pipe, a Prius might be more environmentally friendly that a Hummer. You get to feel good for driving a hybrid, because you’re not polluting the environment. Or, are you?  What if you consider the environmental impact of building and maintaining the vehicles?

Another thing that’s bothered me about hybrid cars is the batteries. Batteries don’t last forever, but the stuff in them can. Who’s monitoring or predicting the environmental impact of that? There are some nasty things in batteries, that I personally wouldn’t want to have lying about. As it turns out, we don’t even have to wait for the batteries to start piling up. Making them is already causing major, localized damage to environment.

As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.  

This is NIMBY in action, folks. And, how does the nickel get from Canada to Japan? It’s shipped to Europe, then China for processing first. 

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.

I’ve demonstrated before (while blog-sitting for Belle) that the gas mileage payoff of a Prius is all but a myth. The Recorder article also mentions that same myth. The only thing left to redeem this vehicle is the cute touchscreen in the dashboard. But, you can get those in lots of other cars (with truck space), too.