Toyota "Green" Dealer "Deals Green"
OK, before we get hit with a lawsuit, Mark Miller Toyota will not offer the “Bob Marley Special” on new Toyotas. Not that it wouldn’t appeal to at least one Prius driver. Anyway, a Market Watch press release tells us that the Utah Toyota dealer is opening the first and only LEED-certified car dealership in the state. (At least he expects a Gold LEED rating when the paperwork clears “in the coming weeks.”) Designed to maximize local and recycled materials and maximize energy and water-efficiency, the new dealership boasts a number of eco-features. Sun-tracking skylights, a cool-roof system, low-flow taps and toilets, rainwater collection and high-speed service bay doors keep energy bills low, and allow Toyota customers to feel a little better about mean-smuggin’ in their Priora. The most gimmicky best feature? “Anyone familiar with Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive knows there is a screen that shows the car’s energy use over a time period. We’ll have the same sort of panel inside the dealership that shows the building’s energy use over the last half hour or so,” reveals Miller. Up next: employees obsessively turning the A/C on and off and bragging on their blogs about how many cubic feet they were able to “hypercool” on a single kilowatt/hour.
More by Edward Niedermeyer
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What? Have they not heard of the much more prestigious Guyincognito certification? It allows for 10x the smugness of the LEED certification but only [s]costs 9x as much[/s] requires a sincere commitment to environmentalism.
"low-flow taps and toilets" I have been in dealerships that had those. Only they were yellow or brown, not green.
Incremental steps forward I'm okay with.