Car And Driver: Ferrari Good, Prius Bad

Lord love a duck, but sometimes the most idiotic things surface on the internet. And a certain piece favorably comparing Ferrari’s environmental impact to that of the Prius doesn’t have the excuse of coming from some blogspot-based Private Snafu in the Army of Davids. No, it comes from Car And Driver. Print Media. The Big Boys. Etcetera. And since they don’t have the decency to expose their own baldfaced disingenuousness and sensationalist ignorance-peddling until after the jump, we’ll return the favor. Car And Driver’s Steve Siler is an idiot, and that’s all we’ll say unless you bump our page views by hitting the jump.

C&D titles this piece of moron, uh, I mean Digg-bait “Save The Earth, Drive A Ferrari.” To highlight the bold investigative qualities of the piece, they subtitle it “How’s this for a convenient truth? Priuses spew out 78 times as much CO2 as Ferraris.” Of course, the idiocy of the entire argument is made abundantly clear by the second paragraph. Subtitled “The Math,” it qualifies the page view-grabbing sensationlism with the revalation that the 7900 Ferraris sold since the Prius’s 2004 introduction will generate about 23m kg of CO2 and consume 2.5m gallons of gas next year. Then comes the jump, and you can probably guess what comes next.

Thanks to the brilliant investigative work of C&D, we now know that the Prius “is pillaging Mother Earth,” in comparison to Ferrari. Why? Because since 2004, Toyota has delivered 609,625 Priora. Sure, each one holds four people, but since there are so many of them on the road and people drive them more than 5k miles per year, the total Prius fleet should emit 1.7 billion kg and 200m gallons of gas. That’s 79 percent as much as the Ferrari fleet! Damn the Prius! Bless the Ferrari! And all praise to the enlightening influence of C&D reportage!

Of course Siler eventually admits that his argument isn’t worth the pixels it was written with. “Okay, we’re totally not serious. Suggesting that, between a Ferrari and a Prius, the premium-swilling prancing horse would be the most environmentally responsible option would be journalistically irresponsible, despite the 1.7 billion kilograms of CO2 that today’s Priuses will pump into the atmosphere over the next year, the 200 million gallons of gas they will consume, and the innumerable quantities of raw materials required to build them and their bespoke metal-heavy hybrid battery packs,” rambles Siler. In other words, Car And Driver practices irresponsible journalism. And run-on sentences. Manfully admitted.

But really, there’s a point to this. You see, Siler’s real aim is made clear in a tacked-on opinion paragraph at the very end of the piece. After admitting the obvious: “if every Prius driver switched into a Ferrari and drove it 15,000 miles per year, the overall picture would be far less green,” he turns this abortion of an editorial towards an impassioned plea to “ Save the Enzos.”

“We hope this fact is not lost on our lawmakers as they further their green-car agendas, the results of which could result in a de facto ban of exotics and super-luxury cars in many states, or at least exorbitant fines being slapped on them. Certainly, buyers of these cars are accustomed to exorbitant fines (six-to-seven-figure MSRPs and gas-guzzler taxes) already. But the added cost may be just enough of a deterrent to keep some customers away—particularly with the economy in the shape it’s in—and that could prompt Ferrari, Lamborghini, and other high-end makes out of the U.S. altogether… we hope that the folks in Washington D.C., Sacramento, and the EU keep things in perspective as they enact legislation that could quite possibly erase the most colorful and beautiful cars in the world from the automotive landscape.”

And a well-made argument it is, too.