Jerry Weber: “When you put $40.00 in your tank and the Prius owner at the next pump hangs up his hose with $18.00 tell me you aren’t going to pay attention. When you put in $60.00 in the spring and he puts in $25.00 you may look even harder.”

Yes indeed! I spent nearly $30 to fill up my Prius yesterday. But I had driven almost 450 miles and gotten over 50 MPG on that tank.

I get better fuel economy than most motorcycles, and I can ride in peace and comfort, without getting hot, cold, or wet.

Stu Sidoti: “My daily driver gets a city-highway average of 34mpg and I have measured that over several occasions…so no the Prius driver is not going to save a lot of money on gas over me…

You can go 34 Miles on a gallon and I can typically go about 48. I’m talking “TOTAL average,” not just highway miles. Like many, I spend about half of my time in rush-hour stop and go traffic. But I still get 48 MPG.

I have no idea what you drive, but just for grins, let’s assume that what you have and what I have are roughly in the same class (mid-size, A/C, all power, has a trunk or hatch area that can carry a few guitars or at least a couple golf bags, and can carry four adults in comfort).

I believe I probably paid $3,000 more for the hybrid components in my car (compared to a similar non-hybrid car).

On average, I can go 14 miles farther on a gallon of gas than you, or 41% farther.

For every 1,000 miles you drive, you pay about $88.00 for regular unleaded (at $3.00 per gallon). For driving the same distance, I pay about $62.00.

That may or may not be a “significant percentage” of your budget or mine, but that $26 will almost fill up my tank one more time!

In (very) round figures, I’ve calculated that I will have to drive my Prius 115,000 miles to reach my break-even point. Assuming that gas remained constantly priced at $3.00 per gallon (which I don’t believe it will; I believe it will rise to $4.00 or $5.00 within the next 18 to 24 months).

At $4.00 per gallon, the equation is the same, but the end-result changes significantly. I would only have to drive my car about 86,000 miles.

I’ve oversimplified it, because fuel prices won’t stay constant over the span of my ownership of the car, but I figured that my cocktail-napkin math was “close enough” for me to just go for it. It’s been a great car, reliable, comfortable, quiet. Hell, what was I going to do, wait for GM?

“and besides Jerry, gasoline cost is a tiny percentage of our household budget…but what you are overlooking is battery replacement cost.”

Uh oh, here we go again…

According to Dave Hermance, one of the Prius’ Chief Engineers, they estimate that the cost of a replacement Prius battery will be around $2500

I don’t know your source for that comment, or when it was made. But let’s factor in the following:

1. What kills batteries’ life-expectancies is repeated deep-discharge cycles, followed by overcharging. Hence, the Prius’s computer system was designed to maintain a state-of-charge range of 40-70%. And in four years of ownership, I think it does a pretty good job of this. Just don’t let yourself run out of gas (THAT would be embarrassing)! And if you do, don’t keep driving it until the hybrid battery is worn down to zero!

2. Greater efficiencies through mass-production and applying “lessons learned” as new technologies become mainstream. Toyota is saying now that the next-generation Prius should have a 20% improvement in fuel-economy. Are you still waiting for GM?

3. Yes, eventually things DO wear out. It’s a fact of life. But contrary to popular (mis)conception, in the event of a failure, the “whole” battery typically wouldn’t need to be replaced. The Prius battery technology is modular, requiring that only the failing module be replaced. Used battery modules recovered from wrecks could conceivabley be put back into service for this. So fear not! The cost is not expected to be anywhere near $2,500 for a “whole” battery.

4. The failure rate for Prius batteries simply hasn’t been a factor. Rumours of two battery problems in ten years of Prius production is a pretty good track record.

5. In four years of living and driving in the blazing Florida heat, I have not had any problems with the batteries in my car. That says a lot, because I can’t even get a laptop computer battery to last longer than a year or a cell phone battery to last longer than 18 months or so!

6. Nobody considers this one, but it’s very important. The Prius’ Hybrid Synergy Drive has NO TRANSMISSION. I won’t ever have to repair or replace any transmission parts. Depending on the car, some transmissions can easily cost $2,500 to $3,000. I like to keep my cars a long time, so I can expect the cost of a “new battery” (as mentioned above, it’s a fallacy; it’s actually multiple batteries in modules) to be a wash compared with a transmission in any “old fashioned” car…

7. There are some Prius taxicabs in service in Pennsylvania, New York, and other cities. They’re even being used as community-officer patrol cars on some college campuses and small towns. With lots of stop-n-go driving, the reports are that these Priuses are STILL going nearly 100,000 miles before needing brake pad replacements. You see, unless you step on the brakes really hard, the car uses generator resistance to slow the car while recharging the battery. So brake pads just aren’t wearing out as often. At this rate, I may only need one brake job during the 115,000 mile “break even” period I mentioned above. Any “ordinary” car might need new brakes three or four times in the same time period that I might only need one! New brake pads usually are not expensive, but it’s the little things that do add up…

So if you’re scared of battery replacement costs, you needn’t be. First, it simply shouldn’t be a factor. Second, there are plenty of other things that will balance out the equation.

I just ask you to please be careful about spreading everything you hear just because it fits in with your preconceptions. Spreading misinformation is just wrong when the truth is easily available. First learn. Then speak!

On the plus side, Toyota does warranty the car for 150,000 miles/10 years and many owners are over 200,000 miles on the original battery…but sooner or later, unless Toyota starts giving away batteries, you are going to see Priuses piling up on the back line of used car lots because at a certain used car price point, virtually no one is going to put $2500 in a car with 150,000 plus miles…of course you’ll never read about that story in the mainstream media because according them Domestic OEMs are Evil and Toyota can do no wrong…

Go back to my comment regarding ten years of Prius manufacture, and my own experience with the car. Battery failures have simply not happened, and the car lots are simply not filling up with used dead Prii.

GM’s problem isn’t that it makes the Tahoe (or Escalade, or Silverado). Please note that Toyota and Nissan have been working to capture sales in those market segments with their latest offerings.

GM’s problem is that it focuses on those segments and treats everything else (save the Corvette and some Cadillacs) as the red-headed stepchildren. Which is not a good strategy in a time of volatile gas prices.

PONTIAC IS CAR

Yes, while we’re at it, I think Pontiac has saved other companies time in creating their own tagline: Starbucks is Coffee. Best Buy is Electronics. Kleenex is Tissues. Kinkos is Office. There, no need to spend millions on focus groups or have sleepness nights. Did they just walk down to the Pontiac Child Care Center, show a kid a matchbox Pontiac only to hear from the kid “Pontiac is car!”

Go to Pontiac’s website and you’ll see “Car” being substituted by other words. In one case you will see “Excitement”. Wouldn’t “Pontiac is Excitement” have been better as the primary tagline as it expresses what Pontiac is really about?

How about those 3 word phrases you see every other company doing? You can incorporate “Car” into it- something like-

Pontiac: Exciting. Sporty. Car.
(Hey GM, you can use this for free and I won’t be offended nor will I ask for royalties because I know you will not use it)

I propose a new tagline for General Motors:
GM is dead.

“As for hybrid technology, all of the US OEMs have always viewed hybrids as merely a stop-gap measure along the way to true fuel-cells and when gas was $1.75/gal. who can honestly blame them for thinking that?”

I’m not sure I understand this…perhaps it’s a technological stop-gap (I think that’s true), but the question is whether the stop-gap is valuable. In which dealership can I now buy the “true fuel-cells”, and where can I refuel/recharge them?

I live in the SF Bay Area, and long before gas was persistently above $3/gal. it used to shoot up and down, wildly. There were always excuses…this refinery had a fire (but why didn’t you prevent that and save your workers injury), CA’s fuel requirements make it an isolated market (so why does our isolated market never drop below that of the rest of the country, only rise above…Texas’ refineries have fires too!), etc.

Long ago, about 10 years ago, as a consumer I concluded that CA’s gas price volatility was simply a leading edge problem, so I purchased accordingly (no, I don’t own a hybrid due to my requirements, but I do get 30 MPG on the highway with AWD). If I could figure that out, why couldn’t Rick Wagoner? He’s paid to figure such things out, I’m not.

In the past the mere mention of California here has driven some people into apoplexy. But…either GM wants us to buy cars or it doesn’t. And if so then less apoplexy might be called for, since we’re customers too, and therefore Always Right. And if not, then what’s the problem?

with 300Nm of torque available on tap, I think many “Amis” would be surprised at how versatile the new diesels are. For example, most people here use big ol’ SUV’s to tow campers. In Europe, 97% of tow-behinds are towed by…you guessed it…diesel sedans. Granted, some of the campers are a tad lighter, but a camper is a camper. I do like the slight “rumble” of the diesel at idle, but they’ve come a long, long way from my 1985 MB 300TD! And at speed (yes, I saw 200 kp/h in the A4 last week!) they are as quiet as anything else on the road. When I’m over in Germany, I exclusively drive diesel. Now if we could get some of the other nifty little cars over here that the Europeans do…:)

For a brief period in GMs existance it was dragged kicking and screaming into the world of modern automobiles. GM gave it a good but poor shot in the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Unfortunately someone forgot to shut the door on the past and after taking some lumps in the mordern car market GM retreated back through the doorway of obsolesnce.

Like a child afraid of trying new things GM was content to make old fashion body-on-frame, live axled cars, ohv v8 cars but renamed them “SUVs”. All was good for a few years. GM was happy and a great deal of nostalgic (”Gotta have a BIG car”) Americans were also happy.

Moral of the story: Any company and/or managers that are willing to stake a great deal of the companies fortune on what amounts to old-fashion, out-of-date technology and building techniques deserves to be in the terrible position they find themselves in today.

I could agree with the stated positons of some of the GM supports here IF the current Tahoe was actually a modern vehicle, Unibody, IRS, serious weight savings, space effecient design, fuel saving diesel engines. BUT IT AINT!
GMs “cash cows” are essentially the same crap that GM was selling as cars 30 some odd years ago. Ok, we now have coil springs and EFI, but big freaken deal!

What the GM fans need to ask themselves and GM is WTF happend to all of that R&D money that obviously did not go into improved products.

I’m not sure that the current generation of diesels would be that hard a sell over here; we just haven’t had the chance to find out. I suspect that there aren’t too many buyers who have vivid negative memories of Mercedes or even Peugeot diesels. I do, and I’d still line up for a chance to buy the kind of diesel-engined cars available in Europe.

Scenario #2 – GM goes under and all of those retirees lose their pensions. No I beleive the Democrats, once in power will be forced to a least bail out the GM Pension fund. Then all of us will get the chance to support the GM retirees with our taxes

You’re quite right. I’m certain that Honda bangs its corporate head against the wall at times given the manner in which Toyota has gotten the green cred, while Honda are uncompromising in following their credo: best mileage/cleanest engines in each category.

Which is why they’re staying out of certain categories where they can’t achieve that.

Toyota makes the Prius, but it also makes lots of big, gas-guzzling vehicles, too, including a revamped Sequoia and Land Cruiser, not to mention the full-size Tundra, which certainly isn’t being sold on the basis of economy, judging by the ads I see.

Toyota makes the Prius and lobbies against the 35 mpg standard because it wants to have its cake and eat it, too. And, given its financial strength and engineering prowess, it can do just that. But let’s not hold it up as a paragon of corporate environmental responsibility.

At least Honda does more to “walk the talk,” with leadership in emissions reduction and clean diesels, and no V-8s or rear-wheel drive (except for the S2000 and NSX), the lack of which are hurting Acura. It also refuses to make a true body-on-frame truck or SUV.

“We think the Prius was originally less about fuel economy and more about a technical and assembly experiment,” he says. “In Japan, the hybrid drive was sold as a cool electronic feature. Fuel economy was hardly mentioned, and I have a hunch that fuel efficiency was a marketing strategy that they just stumbled onto.” – Phillips, Director of GM Intelligence.

In Japan, good fuel economy is a given; saving energy is practically a national mania, so the fuel economy aspect wouldn’t get as much play in Japan.

However, it certainly didn’t escape Toyota’s notice that the fuel economy would be a real differentiator in the NA market but it looks like that never occurred to GM.

“Wired” continues, “With the Prius, says electrical engineer Michael Cutajar, “Toyota took a Corolla and added huge amounts of cost and complexity. They don’t make any money on it.” Toyota scoffs at the idea. “We’re making money on the Prius,” says Nancy Hubbell, a spokesperson for the company, “especially with the economy of scale we’re getting by introducing two new models this year and two next year. The additional cost of a system is more like $3,500 per auto.”

It strikes me as wishful thinking on GM’s part to believe that Toyota can’t build something for less than GM could build it.

This was funny, too, “At the Tokyo auto show in October, GM unveiled its fuel cell-powered Sequel. Larry Burns, GM’s vice president for R&D and planning, announced that the company would be able to “design and validate a competitive fuel cell propulsion system by 2010.”"

Yeah, the Next Big Thing at that time was fuel cells. Now it’s the Volt. Maybe next month is will be waffle-power. GM could probably win in waffle-power.

I also noticed the projection of 100K Priuses/year. Haven’t they been hitting 200K/year? Or is it even more? Clearly, the car is a hit. Neither Wired nor GM expected that.. maybe. More wishful thinking?

Stu,

There’s no quote from Toyota in that link. I belong to organizations which sometimes support policies which I would not.

That quibble aside, for all you or I know, Toyota’s concern with CAFE would be that Detroit would find a loophole big enough to (not quite literally) drive an SUV through. Did they object to it at the point where it contained money for retooling? Would they see that as an advantage principally for Detroit? Further, it seems to me that, at the end, Toyota endorsed the final legislation.

Nor do I notice Toyota attacking the goals of increased CAFE proponents (i.e., the UCS and others) or suggesting that the UCS should do Toyota’s work for it.

That’s a big difference. Lutz is 100% “Can’t Do.” That atttitude will certainly cost GM.

Many of us have worked in organizations where office politics (loyalty) sometimes/often/usually trumped logic. The most extreme example of this in my personal work experience centered around a guy who had obvious emotional problems; unfortunately I reported to this character. He reported to an easily-manipulated alcoholic, which allowed my boss to do his thing(s) for a longer period than might have otherwise been the case. I supervised a highly technical group of about 15 when this nut showed up. I was happy in my job as were the other people in the group. What I observed over the next three or so years was, at the time, astonishing. My boss brought in a series of incompetents who failed in whatever they were given. But they were loyal; make that LOYAL. I saw my boss ‘go after’ a number of people of various levels of competence, and in one case the resulting stress led to a heart attack and death. My boss came after me as well, but failed in his efforts since what my group did was beyond the capability of any of his hacks, and, even to him it was obviously essential that our work be performed well. He made various attempts to disrupt my unit complaining once that we were ‘incestuous’. Gosh, I always thought cohesiveness was a good thing. He had about him some quality that led more than one person to compare him to Hitler.

All this happened a long time ago, and I’ve always been puzzled that someone in charge of an organization of whatever size would not want the best people available in their organization and wouldn’t be more than willing to tolerate a level of disruptiveness or whatever we call thinking that is outside the box.

I read “On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors” by J. Patrick Wright (John Delorean’s book) a year or so ago, and this dysfunctional loyalty or ass kissing or whatever, was rampant and very costly, obviously.

The quote at the top of this post is from Ian Kershaw’s excellent biography of Adolf Hitler, and is taken from a statement Hitler made just before he came to power and in response to what Hitler saw as the disloyalty of one of his associates, Gregor Strasser. Of course I’m not in any way equating anyone in GM to Hitler, but in reading this today it has helped me understand the kind of thinking that some people in positions of power use to gain power and survive and eventually bring disaster to themselves and their organizations. Choosing loyalty and agreement over integrity and reality can’t work over the long term, but clearly it’s a major method used by many managers. From Hitler’s statement, it’s apparent that he deliberately chose loyalty over competence because he believed it to be the only way to his success (”Loyalty in obedience can never be replaced by formal technical measures and institutions”). I’ve always thought that my former boss, and others at whatever point along the continuum of dysfunctional management style, really believed that integrity/competence were preferable, but were unable to discern who had what. Reading this today has caused me to question that; maybe these fools really believed loyalty would work. I guess if you have bosses who think/operate the same way, it can work for some period. It can take a long time for a large and, at the beginning, successful organization, even nation, to collapse.

They take a two-pronged approach. On one hand, they lobby against it for the sake of negotiation leverage. Simultaneously, they also design cars that could comply with it and could appeal to the market. This differs from GM, which does the lobbying but has no product in its back pocket.

It goes back to the usual problem: GM does not make smaller cars that many Americans not named Avis or National wish to buy. Toyota does. When it comes to rolling with the punches, one of them is clearly better prepared, and not surprisingly, it isn’t the one with the Detroit headquarters.

If GM had taken some of the many billions that it had squandered on bad acquisitions and worse products, and invested it instead into building a class-leading four-cylinder motor, then we might not be having this discussion. But it is what it is, and it isn’t good for GM.

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/editorials/alliance-of-automobile-manufacturers-prez-defends-orgs-cafe-stance/

Today the Saturn Vue 2-Mode Hybrid details have been released, and the hybrid system strong enough for a city bus is out of place in a 4300lb “compact” CUV. It’s not due for another 11 months barring delays, fuel economy at best is little better than the BAS Hybrid Vue as it’s paired with a 3.6L V6, and cost is an unanswered (and big) question. At least it can tow 3500lbs, but in reality most CUV’s don’t tow jack.

I don’t know why but I have the strange intuition then Toyota dropped their mask to show their real faces. We’ll talk about it in 20 years to see if the Corolla and Camry are more bigger, longer and wider.

As for GM in panic mode because they don’t have a Prius fighter…

Toyota introduced the Prius in Japan in 1997. I would have thought that was a signal that they were serious about hybrids and that GM should take notice. It’s not like what’s on sale in Japan is some sort of secret.

Also bear in mind that Ford has a hybrid – a pretty good one – on the street TODAY. The Escape hybrid hit the roads two or three years ago. What’s GM’s problem? If Ford had GM’s resources, their hybrid program might be even better.

For years, GM’s response to the hybrid was to diss it. Even after the Clinton Administration laid about a billion bucks on Detroit to build a prototypical high-mpg car of the future.

Fuel economy is, generally, a large black hole for GM. GM’s “best” effort is the Aveo, which is a crappy car with crappy fuel economy (considering its size) imported from Korea. GM has acted, all along, as though fuel economy never was and never will be a consideration.

This shows an amazing lack of foresight. When the first Arab Oil Embargo hit in the ’70’s, Detroit was woefully unprepared and their initial product responses were unbelievably but forgiveably lame. This was an opportunity for the imports, of course. However, in the intervening 34 (!) years, Detroit has done little to get ahead and stay ahead. GM has, occsionally, built decent little cars (I really liked my ‘82 Cavalier and it would turn 40+mpg on the highway) but then they left them to strangle in the market. The current Cobalt is not a competitor.

Given our strategic dependence on imported energy, I’d have to give GM a D- for Citizenship. When they turn around and play the Hug The Flag Game in their ads, it just makes me sick.

As for Toyota making a mistake upsizing the xBox in the face of higher energy prices, the xBox still gets pretty good fuel economy and US fuel prices are still unbelievably cheap. I think they made a mistake upsizing it, too, but it’s not all that important in the grand scheme of things. Toytoa still offers several attractive cars with really good fuel economy. GM doesn’t.

As for “hypocrites” in the UCS, that’s a delightful bit of slander. One of my good friends is a chemical engineer specializing in aerosols and gasses and he has made it a point to study Anthropogenic Global Warming; he’s involved in developing products that reduce our environmental impact, and he’s very worried about our future.

Every bit of new discovery with regards to our atmosphere is a bit of bad news. It was recently proposed that 350ppm CO2 is a limit we should not exceed, for good reason, but we have no hope whatever of stopping at 350ppm (we’re nearly there as it is).

When Lutz whines about the fact that our legislators have finally listened to the legions of scientists who have actually studied atmospheric effects and imposed some limp requirements on Detroit, I see that as good evidence of GM’s “can’t do” attitude and a signal that they won’t be around very long.

If our legislators had done what they should have done and slapped a giant carbon tax on coal and oil, then old Maximum Bob would be sh!tting bricks. As it is, they let him off easy and he shouldn’t be whining about it.

You’ll find the full report here:
http://www.energybulletin.net/7524.html

Automobiles consume 25% of total consumption (around 19 million b/d total.)
Look for:
Table III-1.
Detailed Consumption of Petroleum in the U.S.
by Fuel Type and Sector – 200326
(Thousand of barrels per day)