This article was sent to me by my veggie oil mechanic Kevin Forrest. Below it is a scathing criticism of the article, whose author calls it “a right wing diatribe”:
March 7, 2007 Central Connecticut State University
Editorial & Commentary
March 7, 2007
Prius Outdoes Hummer in Environmental Damage
By Chris Demorro
Staff Writer
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. Before we delve into the seedy underworld of hybrids, you must first understand how a hybrid works. For this, we will use the most popular hybrid on the market, the Toyota Prius.
The Prius is powered by not one, but two engines: a standard 76 horsepower, 1.5-liter gas engine found in most cars today and a battery- powered engine that deals out 67 horsepower and a whooping 295ft/lbs of torque, below 2000 revolutions per minute. Essentially, the Toyota Synergy Drive system, as it is so called, propels the car from a dead stop to up to 30mph. This is where the largest percent of gas is consumed. As any physics major can tell you, it takes more energy to get an object moving than to keep it moving. The battery is recharged through the braking system, as well as when the gasoline engine takes over anywhere north of 30mph. It seems like a great energy efficient and environmentally sound car, right?
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.
However, if that was the only issue with the Prius, I wouldn’t be writing this article. It gets much worse.
Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. 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.
The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, The plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare.
“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.
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?
Wait, I haven’t even got to the best part yet.
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.
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.
So, if you are really an environmentalist - ditch the Prius. Instead, buy one of the most economical cars available - a Toyota Scion xB. The Scion only costs a paltry $0.48 per mile to put on the road. If you are still obsessed over gas mileage - buy a Chevy Aveo and fix that lead foot.
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.
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This response to the above article was posted on a New Mexico Community Mailing List. Just to give multiple perspectives:
[One should see] through the garbage in that right-wing diatribe. I’m no expert on hybrids, electric cars, or Hummers, but here are a few of the absurd lies by omission or outright lies in that article.
First, you really think that a Toyota will go for only 100K miles but the Hummer will go for 300K? That right there makes the article laughable, and easily explains how they were able to get the better efficiency numbers. The day any GM car comes within 50K of a Toyota will be a great day for American car companies, but it’s a long way off.
Second, the nickel argument implies that the entire output of the Sudbury plant goes to the Prius. It also doesn’t break down the amount of nickel per Prius. But I can guarantee you that the pollution due to each Prius is far less than the extra 5,000 pounds of metal and other materials that go into each Hummer. Funny how the author didn’t mention anything about the costs of producing a Hummer, si?
Also, the total shipping pollution for nickel associated per Prius sounds dramatic when you list the places it has to go (assuming any of this is true), but again, weigh things like the weight and amount of pollution per car, and it’s nowhere near the cost of transporting the massive amounts of all kinds of material for a Hummer.
And of course he left out emissions, which are greatly reduced even when taking into account MPG. Also, it’s funny that the author compares the Prius to the Aveo when making his/her MPG arguments, and leaves the Hummer completely out of it.
T this is as transparently bogus a right-wing, Exxon-Mobil written article as I’ve seen in years. I don’t doubt that there are better technologies available than Hybrid. But this article is so filled with right-wing lies, half-truths, misdirections, apples-to-oranges comparisons, etc., that I don’t see how any part of it could be believed.
Any bets that the author is one of the economists or scientists hired by Exxon-Mobil to “debunk” global warming? Yikes. –Carter
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Another response to the Connecticut State Prius article, from the New Mexico Community Mailing List:
This approach to analyzing energy usage from all sources is to be applauded. But the figures in this study don’t seem to compute. Assuming that the owner of the Prius would pay the bill, am I to believe that the cost to the owner would be 325,000 dollars for the life, say about 6 years, of the car? And the comparison of the Prius over a 100,000 mile lifespan to the Hummer over a 300,000 mile lifespan also is pretty misleading.
There is some other fuzzy thinking here: is transporting all the oil half way around the world better than transporting the much smaller quantity of nickel around the world? And how about the environmental damage of oil, from production through burning it. Paul
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Well, well, well. One thing none of these folks mention is that even if the Prius is a great option, it is only one product that Toyota manufactures. It also sells hundreds of thousands of fuel-inefficient V-8 Toyota Tundra. As journalists are often rightly accused of pointing out problems without offering solutions, here’s a link to a site I heard about around the same time Kevin sent me the Prius article. As my mechanical skills roughly mirror Curious George’s, I have no idea if it’s legit, but at least it’s yet another something to add to the Preconscious Digital Age Morass of Things to Think About:
-Doug