Prius = bad for Enviornment

[El Phantasamo]

zeke said:

The only thing E-85 is good for is another whiskey. Some people in Romania (I think) found, that if you pack a PVC pipe with bread, and ran the ethanol through that pipe, it would take out the poison preservative and just turn it into corn whiskey.

Then you drink it, Ill stick to my "Evan Williams"

[Zeke]

hahaha, I think I will have somebody else try it before I go and get CHEAP! Legal whiskey.

And it was like 6 feet of piping.

[Gestapo]

How about Mohawk? 7 dollars a 1/5th anybody?

[El Phantasamo]

gestapo said:

How about Mohawk? 7 dollars a 1/5th anybody?

Id rather have the Romanian filtered E-85

[D.]

gestapo said:

Just a question, when did become such a hippie damo

I don't smoke weed, so I wouldn't go that far.

[VMAX]

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.

An interesting comparitive calculation. But is it assuming the afformentioned 8 mph/second acceleration for both the prius and the aveo?

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.

Have a look at the link below and then tell me how much of a "dead zone" you think Sudbury is.
www.mysudbury.ca/tourism/

“The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside,” said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a British-based newspaper.

Because we all know those Greenpeace guys are real upstanding, straightforward, honest individuals who would never exagerate anything.

All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesn’t end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce?

So are you telling me that the Toyota has their own private container ship to transport just their materials on an "around the world trip" to make the prius. If you are, then I can pretty much guarantee you that you're full of it. Container ships haul thousands of containers around to various places all over the world, and there can be anywhere from several companies on up to over a thousand companies transporting their goods over seas via container on just one ship alone. If the box they loaded on that boat wasn't carrying Prius parts, you can bet there would be another box filled with something else to take its place. Individuals and companies alike always need to have something transported across the ocean. Thats how the shipping companies can afford to keep those big beautiful boats running.

Through a study by CNW Marketing called “Dust to Dust,” the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles - the expected lifespan of the Hybrid.

The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles. That means the Hummer will last three times longer than a Prius and use less combined energy doing it.

Cost to manufacture pehaps, but what about cost of operation. anyone want to get me the mpg specs on a hummer, I'm prety sure the prius will get about double. Furthermore, a 100,00 mile service life for a Toyota? and a 300,000 mile service life for what is essentially a chevy.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? over.

I dont think so.

So it seems to me that this article is nothing more than a sophomoric piece of arrogant ignorance, probably slapped together in an attempt to meet a deadline after slacking off too long.

One last fun fact for you: it takes five years to offset the premium price of a Prius. Meaning, you have to wait 60 months to save any money over a non-hybrid car because of lower gas expenses.

One last fun fact for you:

A lot of people don't buy cars brand new, and a lot more simply lease them till they get sick of them, allowing them to depreciate over time and be bought for a lower price by someone else later on.

[conscript]

the reason our country's gov. is pushing ethanol so much is because america's farming lobbyists are influencing the senators to choose an alternative fuel in which the american farmer can profiet off of, this is dispite the fact that ethanol manufacturing and the hybrid design are costly, inefficient, and seeing that the idea of bio diesel and ethanol have been known energy sources for at least 10 years now it seems they really are not too interested in exploring alternative energy. in my opinion the best solution to the world's energy problems is nuclear power. its expensive? with all of the regulations put on it by the government as well as the lack of a strong nuclear industry pushes the price of nuclear energy up, but if you want the government to put a hand in the power industry or take action to reduce co2 emmissions this is a viable choice. its not safe? where the hell have you been? of the thousands of reactors world wide only one has melted down (this was due in part because technicians were messing around testing something and screwed up) and there are much less minor incidents in the nuclear power industry as in fossil fuel plants. what about the waste? where did that radioactive nuclear material come from? oh thats right, it came from a mine in a remote area thats built to handle radioactive material, just put the waste right back where it came from and had been for the past million years and seal it there so it stays a million more. ethanol is inefficient because it takes too much energy to harvest and create it, hybrids are too underdeveloped to be viable solutions, hydrogen works but too many are afraid to have a gas that didn't actually destroy the hindenburg in their car, bio diesel is more of a hobby right now in which people pick up cooking oil, refine it, and then run on it and if one trys to make it on the scale that gasoline is now it will just be as much of a hassle as ethanol.

[Ghast]

That was the single most difficult brick of text that I have never tried to read.

[El Phantasamo]

vmax said:

......Cost to manufacture pehaps, but what about cost of operation. anyone want to get me the mpg specs on a hummer, I'm prety sure the prius will get about double. Furthermore, a 100,00 mile service life for a Toyota? and a 300,000 mile service life for what is essentially a chevy.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? over......

Very Simple Vmax.

The Hummer H1 is a civilianized version of a military vehicle. With proper maintenance (and the military takes VERY good care of all of their equipment, ESPECIALLY vehicles) the drive-line will last 300,000 miles. Even though the Chevy DruraMax diesel that powers the new ones is essentially a "disposable engine", 300K is a reasonable service life. Big Rig diesel engines (some up to 15 liters ) have service lives from 900,000 to 1,100,000 miles. Again, these are VERY well cared for, and have oil systems holding anywhere from 40 to 60 QUARTS of 15W40 motor oil (roughly 10 times the amount of oil in your car or truck/SUV)


As for the Prius, I don't have any information about the battery life for the Hybrid drive system. I have seen articles in "trade rags" estimating their life between 80,000 and 120,000 miles. these can be VERY expensive to replace, perhaps more so than replacing an engine in a typical front wheel drive sedan.

You have peaked my curiosity Vamx, I'm going to look in the Mitchell repair information system (standard repair and estimating system used by auto mechanics. The information it has is condensed from factory manuals) and find out what the cost of replacing the hybrid batteries is, and at what interval replacement is required, if at all.

[bikerted86]

i as a mechanic think that diesel will be the next major fuel not necessarily bio diesel but with the right controls a diesel will run on anything mildly flammable
The us government built a diesel motorcycle that can run on just about everything from kerosene to liquor.
I have worked on several E-85 suburbans that all had drivability problems due to the ethanol fuel. All I'm really saying is that a diesel is way less picky on what it burns than a gas motor so why are all the designers and engineers making it so hard on themselves?

[Mr Embed]

Well.. I'm here in the lovely state of California and none of them seem to have read this article. I've counted as many as 26 Prius's in the two days I've been here. This number is only expected to rise over the next 6 days. Perhaps I sould print out a bunch of copies and stick them on the Prius owners' windshield.

[El Phantasamo]

bikerted86 said:

i as a mechanic think that diesel will be the next major fuel not necessarily bio diesel but with the right controls a diesel will run on anything mildly flammable
The us government built a diesel motorcycle that can run on just about everything from kerosene to liquor.
I have worked on several E-85 suburbans that all had drivability problems due to the ethanol fuel. All I'm really saying is that a diesel is way less picky on what it burns than a gas motor so why are all the designers and engineers making it so hard on themselves?

Because Diesel engines got a bad impression form GM engineers in the past. Remember the old GM 350 diesel? Basically GM engineers made as little modifications as they needed to to make a gasoline engine run on diesel fuel. It was a spectacular FLOP, resulting in broken cylinder haed bolts ands class action lawsuits. In America when people think of Diesel engines, they think of engines that break constantly and huge clouds of black smoke from the tailpipe

the modified diesel pickups aren't helping much either. I saw a Ford F-250 a while ago let out a HUGE plume of black smoke from a red light. Many of these aftermarket diesel tuners are dumping WAY too much fuel in these engines. this is why I like Banks products, Gale Banks hates black diesel smoke as much as I do.

With DPF's (Diesel Particulate Filters) becoming more commonplace (there on all school buses in the state of Michigan), we will have cleaner running diesel engines now and even cleaner ones in the future. the only bad part is if I want my diesel VW, i have to get a used one because they aren't imported for the 2008 model year. I guess they need to do more work to make them US emissions legal (probably why Stapo said Ireland smelled like cigarette smoke and diesel fumes)

the up side to a used VW is that I can call Gale Banks engineering right away and see what they have for speed parts. Its amazing what you can do with an upgraded turbo, intercooler, and re-flash the PCM to compensate. Ill probably have to upgrade the clutch to handle the increase in torque.

I cant wait........