As much as some of us tire of Prius-bashing, some of us also grow weary of Diesel-bashing.

Some things to remember:

* The original design goal of the IC/Hybrid vehicle was low-emissions to meet CARB mandate. Fuel efficiency is a side benefit, NOT a design goal.

* The Diesel is the most efficient internal combustion engine in widespread use.

* Unlike gasoline, the Diesel engine has the benefit of running with several alternative fuels, at virtually any ratio. Meaning it can run on petroleum, vegetable oils, BioDiesel, or any mixture of the above.

* Diesel would in reality be the ideal IC engine to use in an electrical/IC hybrid vehicle if fuel efficiency was the goal.

* By combining a Diesel-electric hybrid drive with a non-petroleum based fuel source, you could have the ultimate low-emission, high-efficiency automobile.

The tough parts about that ultimate hybrid is scale. Much like a fully electric (ie zero-emissions) car, the trade-offs prevent large-scale deployment and acceptance. Petroleum is easy compared to bio-fuel production and emissions of such engines vary widely based of the feedstock of the fuel’s source supply. Gasoline is ubiquitous, Diesel almost, BioDiesel? Hardly. BioFuels are just now in their infancy and so little is known about them.

But no, everyone has their bias, or skin in the game and instead of creatively thinking about how to improve the situations, everyone plays the “this is better than that” game and it devolves into a bash-fest/pissing contest/swordfight. Sigh.

Batteries are nasty. Gasoline is nasty. Diesel is nasty. It is ALL nasty. There is no such thing as a “green car” just varying shades of nasty. The only “green” way to move about the surface of the planet is with your own two feet, or a bicycle.

–chuck
http://chuck.goolsbee.org

My Prius, at 45 to 47 (we’ll call it “46″) Real-World MPG (50% highway, 50% stop-and-go) will require 2,174 gallons of “regular unleaded” gasoline.

If that gasoline cost me an average of $3.00 per gallon, it will cost me just over $6,500 for fuel.

An H3 is no doubt a different vehicle, but if these bulging-forehead mathmagicians at foo-foo universities can compare apples to oranges, then so can I, dammit! :) Besides, I’ve never seen a consumer-market Hummer doing any “real” work outside of transporting one human being to or from work during the morning drive.

Never saw one hauling a boat.
Never saw one on a construction site.
Never saw one going off-road anyplace.
Can’t remember seeing one carrying more than ONE person, except on the occasional television show.

But we all know that no CSI labs lease or own Hummers in Real Life, so as far as I can tell, the Hummer IS being used for the same things that the Prius is!

:O

A Hummer H3 (the smallest one) gets 20 MPG EPA on the highway. Hey, let’s use that number! To go 100,000 miles, it’ll require 5,000 gallons. Times $3.00 per gallon, and that comes to $15,000.

Of course, I made several assumptions. Can anybody tell us if a Hummer H3 runs on regular unleaded, or does it require mid-grade or premium?

Can a Hummer go 100,000 miles?

Of course a Hummer can go 100,000 miles. As a permanently-former GM owner, I simply could not resist a bit of editorial license. But I CAN resist the manufacturer. ;)

Folks, ya gotta take these studies with a grain of salt. Okay, a dumptruck of salt.

And the whole battery thing. Look, the Prius has been on the road for 10 years now. Anybody who’s still bleating that tired old “batteries in the landfill” saw can be easily identified as somebody who hasn’t been paying attention. If it’s an average joe or jane, I can forgive that to some extent.

But readers of this site probably should know better…long battery life and recycling has been mentioned many times by myself or other Prius owners.

And of course, if it’s a member of the press repeating such nonsense, then I think it’s okay to pass judgement on them. They’re not doing a minimum of research. They’re not paying attention. Or they are letting their bias run rampant. Or they’re in SOMEBODY’s pocket. In any event, it disqualifies them from any further respect in their profession.

Okay, I’m off to haul more mulch and compost. Why, yes of course I will be taking my Prius. I can fit 50 cubic feet in it, as long as it’s not over 700 pounds or so!

…You just can’t win sometimes . . .

Hehehe, ain’t THAT the truth!

I recently read an article about..get this, TOO MANY TREES being a contributing factor to global warming.

Something about too many trees in the Northern climates, preventing snowpack from melting, and thereby denying the atmosphere of much needed moisture, which would then be whisked off to become rain in the equatorial and Southern locales courtesy of the jetstreams.

Yeah, I remember more now. There was also the issue of too much reflected sunlight from the too much un-melted snowpack. All that evil sunlight bouncing around up there!

Are we back to coffee being bad for us, or am I still allowed to drink it this week? I’m livin’ large at the moment, because I’m allowed to consume coffee and real butter this week. ;)

I wonder what we’ll do about the coming “Global Cooling” scare, in ten years or so. Admit it, we all know it’s coming. These so-called scientists who put out crap studies such as the one reported in this article don’t know what they’re talking about. ;) It’s on again, it’s off again. Whoops, nope, it’s on again!

So when the global cooling scare comes, as it no doubt will, I wonder if we will be MANDATED to switch from solar to oil? Will I be forced to drive an SUV and host more barbeques? That could be fun, as long as beer isn’t “found” to be bad for me, along with coffee and butter (by that time).

Sorry, I have to stop typing now. I’m laughing too hard to spell correctly!

You just can’t win sometimes . . .

In addition to ret’s comments above, diesel-electric locomotives don’t store electricity in batteries for later consumption. The diesel engine turns a generator to produce electricity to spin the wheels, now. All the time that the loco is sitting, the engine is idling and the electricity is not stored. Therefore, no batteries.

I watched a show on Discovery a while back that showed new trains are actually using batteries to store energy with regenerative braking. This battery pack is then used during the acceleration period, allowing smaller diesel engines and better efficiency.

Those are the only “environmental concerns” that matter. Who gives a crap if there’s a battery in a landfill 1000 miles away from me?

You are correct, of course. However I stand by the claim that the same principles are in play on a smaller scale, with energy storage as an added benefit from the specifics of the application to automobiles vs. locomotives. I understand the powertrain specifics are different, and driven in the case of locomotives largely by the benefits of electric motors over complex mechanical gearing to keep the diesel in its prime power band. Also regenerative braking in the case of locomotives plows power back into further braking, not storage for future acceleration as in the case of the Prius. But the principles (recapture energy from deceleration that would otherwise be lost, make use of the electric motor’s flat torque curve for acceleration from a dead stop, etc.) are the same, IMHO, although the execution is certainly different.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that locomotive tech was scaled down for the Prius. Just that someone long ago recognized the value of those concepts in heavy applications, and there’s no reason for an academic researcher to presume that the concepts should inherently not succeed in automotive applications, and then not produce any hard evidence to prove so beyond hand-waving bs.

In the UK we used SULPHURIC acid! ;O)

Not to mention car batteries contain lead and lead oxide. When a battery is flat it contains high levels of lead sulphate which is highly toxic and can cause anemia and kidney failure. And we’re worried about Hybrid nickel hydride batteries!

Trust me, I may not know much about cars but I am a chemist and I know how toxic and dangerous car batteries can be.

In addition to ret’s comments above, diesel-electric locomotives don’t store electricity in batteries for later consumption. The diesel engine turns a generator to produce electricity to spin the wheels, now. All the time that the loco is sitting, the engine is idling and the electricity is not stored. Therefore, no batteries. (Don’t know if they’re started with an on-board battery powered starter, or if they’re connected to a start cart of some sort. Don’t think I’ve ever been near one when it fired up.)

Like RF said, the damning quote (from the FT link): “For the other 50 per cent, it ranked vehicles on their construction, energy and end-of-life costs, based on their length, width and weight.”

In other words, bigger cars are bad for the environment because they require more resources to make them. Wow. As a academic scientist myself, this makes me cry with shame.

As for Prius batteries, read this
link.

Prius owners can get $150 refund for their batteries, and Toyota recycles or refurbishes them. The astonishing thing is that most of the time, simply replacing the defective module (out of 28 modules), will allow the battery pack to keep going for another 6 years. Far from being a problem, battery replacement is so cheap that the refurbished batteries cost 1/4th of the original price, so they expect a boom in the used Prius market.

This study is just green-envy. Toyota has not only stolen a march on hybrid tech, they have specifically designed batteries for easy recycling and reuse, and they are accumulating more experience with managing and reducing hybrid lifetime costs every day.

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that the Prius does use conventional brake fluid. I know this because my son bought one last year, and I was showing him how to check the fluid levels under the hood. There is no power steering fluid reservoir, because the steering is electric (as is the case for some conventional cars today).

I don’t believe there are any current cars (yet) that are fully brake-by-wire.

It’s “greenis envy.”

You’re half right.

Locomotives are “hybrids” in that they run a diesel engine to run a generator which creates the electricity to turn the motors which turn the wheels. Which means that the electric motors are full-time.

HOWEVER!!!

That is what is known as a “series hybrid” versus the Prius model which is a “parallel hybrid”. The difference being that the Prius sometimes (or often, depending on your driving habits) uses its petrol engine to move the wheels directly. This lacks efficiency because the engine must be tuned to run at a range of loads and RPMs. The series hybrid system allows an engineer to tune a petrol (or diesel, or bio-fuel) engine to run at peak efficiency for a given load and at given RPMs.

So, to say that the same technologies are efficient at a smaller scale is a little misleading because, until GM show us the Volt, no one is actually making a machine with the same technology scaled down. It’s a different critter and may not have the same benefits.

I like my Crown Vics just fine thanks (GASP), but ya gotta be an idiot to not see that Toyota has a good thing going with that car.

The study’s conclusions relied on a projected life of just 100K miles for the Prius and 300K miles for the Hummer. *Many* Priuses have already been documented going *well* past the 100K mark but I don’t think I’ve seen any reports of *any* Hummer going 300K miles.