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Cynthetiq · 05-06-2008, 09:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by willravel

The wait time likely depends on where you are. I'm near a few dealerships, but I'm also near some of the most liberal people west of the Mississippi. There were even waiting lists for the Escape Hybrid here. I'm most excited about the electric version, though. It's supposed to get the equivalent of well over 120 mpg and of course has absolutely zero emissions (besides having the recycle the battery many years down the road).

or creating the battery....

the run off from the manufacturing the collection of the materials from different locations to be brought to the manufacturing location and then to the car manufacturing plant. There's alot of shipping going on there.

Hidden Cost of Driving a Prius Commentary.pdf

Quote:

The nickel for the battery, for instance, is mined in Sudbury, Ontario, and smelted at nearby Nickel Centre, just north of the province's massive Georgian Bay. Toyota buys about 1,000 tons of nickel from the facility each year, ships the nickel to Wales for refining, then to China, where it's manufactured into nickel foam, and then onto Toyota's battery plant in Japan.

That alone creates a globe-trotting trail of carbon emissions that ought to seriously concern everyone involved in the fight against global warming. All told, the start-tofinish journey travels more than 10,000 miles - mostly by container ship, but also by diesel locomotive.

But it's not just the clouds of greenhouse gases generated by all that smelting, refining, manufacturing and transporting that worries green activists. The 1,250-foot-tall smokestack that spews huge puffs of sulphur dioxide at the Sudbury mine and smelter operation has left a large swath of the surrounding area looking like a surrealistic scene
from the depths of hell.

On the perimeter of the area, skeletons of trees and bushes stand like ghostly sentinels guarding a sprawling wasteland. Astronauts in training for NASA actually have practiced driving moon buggies on the suburban Sudbury tract because it's considered a duplicate of the Moon's landscape.

"The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants, and the soil slid down off the hillside," David Martin, Greenpeace's energy coordinator in Canada, told the London Daily Mail.

"The solution they came up with was the Superstack. The idea was to dilute pollution, but all it did was spread the fallout across northern Ontario," Martin told the British newspaper, adding that Sudbury remains "a major environmental and health problem. The environmental cost of producing that car battery is pretty high."

while it's not apparent to the end user, the creating of the product creates a lot of pollution.

My Neon seems to be better energy saver than your Mitsubishi via this study.

Quote:

Sizing Up Energy Footprints
AAA NY

A new study casts a different light on vehicles’ environmental effects. For the most energy-efficient vehicle—all things considered—you can’t do better than the Scion xB. That’s the word from a recent analysis of vehicles’ lifetime energy usage by CNW Market Research, an Oregon-based research group. Surprisingly, the Toyota Prius and other hybrids don’t look so environmentally friendly when viewed through CNW’s lens.

Researchers collected data on the energy usage of ’06 models from drawing board to scrapheap—or “Dust to Dust,” as the report’s title puts it. They included plant-to-dealer fuel costs, electricity used per pound of material, and hundreds of other factors, as well as more conventional and obvious measurements, such as fuel economy and emissions. CNW then translated the data into a simple number: lifetime energy cost per mile driven.

Under this analysis, the Scion xB had the lowest lifetime energy cost per mile at 49 cents. The rest of the top 10 included the Dodge Neon (64 cents), Chevrolet Tracker (67 cents), Saturn Ion (67 cents), Jeep Wrangler (70 cents), Toyota Corolla (72 cents), Chevrolet Aveo (74 cents), Hyundai Elantra (75 cents), Scion xA (76 cents) and Chevy S10 pickup (76 cents). By contrast, the Toyota Prius clocked in at slightly less than $2.87 per mile—only a little better than the industry average of $2.95. More costly manufacture, replacement and disposal of batteries, electric motors and other components contributed to the relatively high lifetime expense of this and other hybrids.

“If a consumer is concerned about family budgets or depleting oil supplies, it is perfectly logical to consider buying high fuel-economy vehicles,” says Art Spinella, CNW president. “But if the concern is of broader issues such as the environmental impact of energy usage, some high-mileage vehicles actually cost society more than conventional or even larger models over their lifetime.”

CNW's 'Dust to Dust' Automotive Energy Report