MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
coffeeking - true but if you walk, get a lift, get the train etc....
Maybe it's cos I lived in the sticks, and had to drive EVERYWHERE. Like a 7 mile round trip to get a pack of fags. The novelty of being able to drink when I want has not worn off yet 🙂
I loved driving on country roads too. Even did a few track days. Then I realised I was pushing 1.5 tons of metal, once round the Earth, every year, just to put food on my plate. Madness. So I moved. What I'll do for a next job, I don't know.
But I do know I've put enough crap in the atmosphere. It doesn't need any more from me.
Do you actually live in the UK? Traffic is an enormous problem here, where I live it can take an hour and a half to drive 4 miles, tell me that there isn't something wrong, surely we should be looking for a solution that reduces our reliance on the thing that seems to cause a lot of problems.
I do, always have worked in cities (my job is only done in cities) and lived 10+ miles away (as nice houses in nice areas cost a LOT less and I hate city life in general). Longest I've every queued was on the way into Liverpool on a day when they chose to do a traffic stop on the main route in, during a local derby match day. Took me 1hr and 15 mins to do 17 miles. If it was much worse than that I'd use the bike, but generally its a half-hour job as the road network into Liverpool is pretty good. If it took me 1.5 hours to do 4.5 miles I'd bike it, no questions asked - anyone not doing seems to be mental, but I've never even heard of traffic like that around the north west. Plus I have now got the additional flexibility of being able to work flexi-hours so it can take as little as 20 mins for me to drive into work these days, averaging 45ish overall in a joyful blast through country roads. Driving is a truly wonderful thing - without it I couldnt really bike anywhere too interesting, I couldnt do my other sport at all. In fact I'd become a beer swilling, couch potato that took public transport to the nearest football match - what a great idea 😀
Then I realised I was pushing 1.5 tons of metal, once round the Earth, every year, just to put food on my plate. Madness. So I moved.
Fair enough, but I much prefer the peace, quiet and village atmosphere of living in the sticks with a quiet garden to relax in. If I have to drive for an hour a day to have that I will, for the sake of my family and any future kids I have. Dont get me wrong, if my work would let me work from home or could be placed in the fields nearby I'd jump at the chance, but it cant.
Ban private motoring reintroduce works vans for works business
Bring Taxi rates down
Make decent bikes cheaper
Sort the trains out properly
Move as much freight onto canals as poss
Run the busses on old filtered chip fat, increase fleets and quality considerably
Of course, that'd require considerable eduction, investiment, thought, planning and will. Which ain't gonna happen in a democracy where lowest common denominator thinking pervades and people vote for whoever will allow them to be laziest.
However, (here it goes) how many homes have someone drive to work, but leave someone at home for most of the day
Or even have two people drive to work - how would the figures compare if both home-worked?
Or even have two people drive to work - how would the figures compare if both home-worked?
It's all hugely dependent on personal circumstances. I made an assumption of a 6-mile commute (based on a staff survey), a 6-month heating season, and used averages for fuel efficiency, home energy efficiency etc. I also assumed that the home wouldn't normally be heated during office hours, but would be if you work at home. Overall, it's more energy efficient to drive to work, but of course there are lots of exceptions.
Surely a 6 mile cycle would be rather better?
Surely a 6 mile cycle would be rather better?
Yes, if you commute by bike or public transport (because buses and trains run regardless of whether an individual uses them) then it's nigh-on impossible for homeworking to have a net environmental benefit.
Maybe if you ran a business from a shed? 🙂 Unless you were sourcing parts from the far east though....
Prius batteries seem likely to last the whole lifetime of the car - they are managed differently to the batteries in laptops etc and last far longer. I've read about tests and real world cars that do over 200k miles on the same battery easily enough. There are some battery failures, but there are failures in any component in a car. Plus the battery's modular so you can replace the cells that fail not the whole thing. As of about a year ago I don't think anyone had ever ordered a complete battery pack as a spare part. The battery pack has a 100k mile/8 year warranty in California incidentally.
As for getting decent mileage out of it, it's a buit pointless to buy a fuel efficient car and flog it everywhere. There are a few tricks to learn to get the best economy (i.e. accelerate reasonably briskly to optimise the engine efficiently then back off when you're at speed - rather than accelerating really slowly) but that doesn't take long if you pay attention. I drive the speed limit all the time FWIW.
And yes, it's much more economical to drive a tiny flimsy car but people won't do that. Some folk want a bigger car and want to fit four adults and their stuff in it. You're starting a whole new debate then about lifestyles, which is not something cars like the Prius are designed to address. They exist because people won't give up their luxuries, so they aim to make those luxuries as clean as possible.
CK, you say that vastly higher NOx emissions from diesel is only a problem in cities like that's some kind of insignificant special case... A very great deal of pollution is created in cities dontcha know... 🙂 right where all the people are around to breathe it all in.
I bought my Prius cos it was cool and I liked it. Bluemotion/ecomotive/eDrive etc cars from VW and Volvo etc weren't around then. If they had been I'd have done a lot more test driving.
Molgrips - you really are kidding yourself - your prius is [i] in overall lifetime environmental cost[/i] worse than most mid sized cars. You have those batteries to make, those rare minerals to mine ( which incidently fuels wars in Africa) They are not very energy efficient at all over their total lifetime including building and disposal.
Incidentally you can fit four adults and all their kit in a 2CV easily Probably more interior room than your prius.
Prius are an environmental greenwash - no better than most cars and significantly worse than many
I can thrash my 2litre D about all day and still get more mpg than the manufacturer specifies as combined
Isn't it a slightly older car? A few years back you could rely on getting the combined figure in real world driving, that's no longer true as manufs are getting much better at fixing the tests. My mate's Octavia is quoted at 57mpg combined but he gets about 45 max and that's driving on almost all country roads which should be perfect conditions for the best mpg.
Possibly the best energy saving feature of the Prius is a readout that graphs your MPG over the last 30 minutes of driving and big yellow graph bar that shows your instantaneous mpg, so you're always reminded of how much fuel you're using. If you buy a car for maximum mpg then you make damn sure you get it!
The thing is, most people won't care as discussed above. Once people can afford their fuel then they don't care any more and people will buy for other reasons. This is of course the root of the problem - people just don't care. I'd say a good 70% of Prius drivers in the US are just trying to save money, screw the environment. Then again, it's a car aimed at the US and it's done much more to cut emissions there since most people are trading a car that does 30mpg for one that does 55. It's true that diesels have an image problem so they're not popular, but it's also true that their NOx and SOx emission regulations are far far stricter than ours (cos of smog problems) and most diesels don't meet them. You haven't been able to get our beloved VW diesels there since I think 2001, but for 2009 they've just managed to get the emissions to meet the stringent California standards, so now they are available. Also diesel's a good 50% more expensive than petrol typically and during the recent fuel price hikes it was more than double.
your prius is in overall lifetime environmental cost worse than most mid sized cars.
I'd like to see a decent proof of that. The study that most people quote that was done by some US agency I actually read, and it was total garbage. Figures please.
[quote[those rare minerals to mine
Is nickel rare?
Incidentally you can fit four adults and all their kit in a 2CV easily Probably more interior room than your prius
Hahaha, now who's kidding themselves? You are just raving there mate. Ever been in a Prius? I've been in a 2CV.
The simplist way to reduce car pollution is to reduce car usage by putting up the cdost per miles. Easiest way of doing that is increase fuel taxes and get rid of VED. Ratchet the fuel costs up annually. It took a generation or two to get where we are - it will take a similar time to change behaviour again.
Private motoring and commuting simply are not sustainable in their currant form.
If petrol was £25 a gallon how long before we had 100mpg cars?
There are lots of non-environmental downsides to our car culture, which electric cars do nothing to reduce.
YOu can certainly fit 4 adults and their kit in a 2cv. Certainly looks to have more cubic than a prius
As for the prius lifetime environmental penalty that is simply true. Its a greenwash thats all it is. 2 drivertrains and power sources, batteries and fuel tanks. it simply makes no sense. You have an ordinary car plus those batteries. Its MPG is reasonable but not good. You have to balance that decent mpg against the environmentla cost of manufacturing those batteries and electric drivetrain - and it don't add up
"Molgrips - you really are kidding yourself - your prius is in overall lifetime environmental cost worse than most mid sized cars."
I'm ambivalent about the Prius, but this probably isn't true. The majority of a car's lifetime impact is tied up in its fuel consumption. It might be fair to say that the Prius will have a slightly higher lifetime impact than a conventional car doing the same mpg, but there are so many variables regarding raw materials, factory practices etc, that we can't even be sure of that.
I can find no decent figures that stand up to scrutiny - but I did find this from the telegraph which is interesting
"Toyota is still refusing to release figures on the energy use and carbon-dioxide production in building the Prius or recycling it. This is despite detailed requests from The Daily Telegraph and the Government Car Service in response to a Prime Minister's Question. "
I think the Toyota hybrid drive is a bit of an evolutionary dead end, especially when mini diesel/ electric vehicles start coming out.
But still the biggest thing is to attempt to change the prevailing culture of driving everywhere as it has such enormous consequences on everyone.
All that's not to say that the Prius is a total waste of time. Individual cars may be not better, or perhaps worse, to build and run than a normal car, but they do represent the (AFAIK) first 'proper' car that a regular person could buy that is a step away from the ICE and maybe raised the profile of all this stuff with the punters. The benefits of the work/research that's been done to get to that point should be put in the balance too.
Of course this is all in the context of making lower-impact cars to basically allow us to carry on pretty much as we have been for the last 50-60 years. I'm with miketually, aP, and others who've pointed out that it would be good to see a shift away from reliance on cars rather than just making those cars 'greener', a step in the right direction though it might be.
Once the wheels are driven by electric motors, couldn't we have cars powered by whatever we liked?? You could choose between fuel cells, batteries or petrol/diesel hybrid at point of purchase based on whatevers most efficient.
It must be possible to build swappable version of these different power sources at the cost of some efficiency.
molgrips, your maths is wrong. By my calcs given current prices near me (93.9/101.9) 57mpg petrol equates to ~62mpg diesel on a cost basis, and ~63mpg diesel on a CO2 emission basis (using ransos's 11% figure). That puts it pretty much in the ballpark of CK's diesel, or probably worse given the implied difference in driving styles. I don't do quite as well as him, but then my car is a big beasty, I always speed on motorways where possible, and it's over 10 years old (hence I'm doing a good job of amortising the production CO2).
Of course most Pious owners don't actually get anywhere near 57mpg.
Electric cars will never work in this society. When the 1st person trips over a charging cable in the street and makes a claim they will be health and safetied out of existance 🙄
Plus theyre colder than sleeping in a tent, so theyre well out.
I'll correct my own figures - petrol prices are actually 95.9 (I obviously don't pay much attention to them), so 57mpg petrol is actually equivalent to 60.5mpg diesel on a cost basis, even less advantage to the Pious.
OK I have just been in a discussion of this with a representative of Toyota's Hybrid technology (one of their chief powertrain design engineers). Some key points they made, thought you'd all be interested - no opinions from me here:
1)The soon-coming, latest version of the prius will produce 89g/km CO2.
2)It will achieve 72mpg at best, this will decrease with increased journey length - the prius (and all their technology) is designed for city use primarily, however it is still likely to be better than current petrols.
3)Compared to an equiv. sized petrol automatic (not sure why they choose this comparison) the full 150k km life cycle CO2 output from mining to recycling via battery production etc) of the latest generation will be 47% lower than the petrol but only 15% lower than the equivelent manual diesel. He wouldnt be drawn on the problem of unpleasant chemicals in teh battery but they claim the battery will last >400,000km due to their charging/discharging methods.
4)They are investigating, but dont currently see any chance of all electric (plug in only) vehicles due to the fact that they need an 80kg battery for 10km of operation, this scales up with range and gets increasingly worse due to added weight needing added power. In order for them to have lasting batteries AND all electric they'd need to pull a trailer around with them just to get 60km range. Existing high-range EVs have limited cell life due to using the full range of charge which naturally damages the batteries. This means its very expensive in the long run and not environmentally friendly.
5) In the UK, due to our high use of fossil and nuke fuels for elec generation, the well to wheel carbon output of an all-elec vehicle at max efficiency would produce around 120g/km. Clearly this doesnt compete with existing technology, though its better on the other unpleasantries like NOx. In places like italy its a bit more evenly balanced due to their higher use of renewables.
All comparisons done with similar sized and powered cars, he happily pointed out a prius cant compete with something like a blue motion dinky toy based solely on the grounds of mass shifting. Obviously all these figures come from their own research so it's hard to say they're the "truth" but they are the figures that are driving their strategies.
Anyone see [url= http://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar ]Who Killed the Electric Car[/url]?
Very sad.
Yep, I saw it. Seemed to me to be some "enthusiasts" with a point but making it into more than it really was, if you catch my drift.