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They responded with a link to their "Green By Design" web page.

The original article is an opinion piece for a small college newspaper. The whole article is garbage. 1. Take the "spitting distance" mileage, for example. The new EPA combined mileage put the Chevy Aveo at 26 mpg, the Toyota Prius at 46 mpg. So I guess 20 miles more per gallon is "spitting distance." 2. The "Dust-to-dust" study is from a marketing firm, not a science journal. It arrives at an artificially high cost for the Prius by assigning it an arbitrary lifespan of 100k miles, and a Hummer 300k miles. There's Prius being used as cabs that have 200k on them now: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8839690/ And, insofar as a car lasting, what car do you expect to repair less? A Toyota Prius or a GM Hummer? You can check Consumer Reports for the answer to that one. A good analysis of the flaws in dust-to-dust is available at: http://www.truedelta.com/blog/?p=48 3. The Sudbury info is seriously outdated, and the comment about moon buggies (like, when did Nasa test moon buggies -- early 1970's) ought to have given the author a clue. Sudbury was polluted by a century of mining (1870 on). In fact, some of Sudbury's nickel went into making the Statue of Liberty. Currently, the mine is owned by INCO (not Toyota), and produces 100,000 tons of nickel a year, of which Toyota buys 1% (1000 tons). Nickel, by the way, is primarily used to make stainless steel. The Mail on Sunday newspaper, which ran the story the college article is a thin re-write of (visible here http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/live/articles/ news/news.html?in_article_id=417227&in_page_id=177 0 ), used a stock photo from 1994 to illustrate the pollution (visible here http://www.photoboy.com/bin/Cklb?vmo=1173985067754 ). There were, of course, no Prius in existence or being manufactured in 1994. Sudbury is no longer as polluted, as INCO and the city have planted over 8 million trees there since 1979. The best history online of the Sudbury devastation/reforestation comes from GM Canada (the trees were all cut down in 1871 to help rebuild Chicago after the fire), and it provides telling photos of some of the reclamation from 1979 to present. http://www.gmcanada.com/inm/gmcanada/english/about /MissionGreen/Daily/Sep22.html The acid rain problem David Martin of Greenpeace is talking about in is the situation pre 1972. INCO on regreening and SO2 emissions http://www.inco.com/development/community/profiles /sudbury/default.aspx

Before I start, let me just say that I DO NOT think the Hummer is an "environmentally friendly vehicle". The current incarnation of the Hummer (the H3) is nothing but a GMC Canyon, a rather small pickup truck.

While the Canyon comes in both inline-4 and inline-5 cylinder models, the H3 comes with the I-5 by default, at 242HP. Five cylinders, people.. in a configuration that is known to be more efficient than V* models. Most cars have more cylinders than this "truck". And when it comes to trucks, believe me, there's a huge difference between this and a 5.7L V8.

Towing capacity. When we needed a truck to tow our new boat (3500lbs wet-weight, which was the max for our van.. doable, but barely) we specced these out of curiosity. Unfortunately I don't have the number on hand, but an H3 could not tow our boat; it had a towing capacity near 2500lbs. This is not a heavy-duty truck.

Frankly it gets to me when people tout the "OMG ITS AN SUV" line; don't get me wrong, they are not what we should be driving to save the environment; but take a look at the number of half-ton pickups out there with 5.7L V8 engines. We don't see this as a problem, because these full-fledged trucks are perceived as working vehicles.. But go ahead, take another look. Look at the number of trucks on the road with pristine paint jobs and sexy aluminum rims. Working vehicles? I think not. The truck has been made into one of the most beautiful vehicles to drive, but they are also one of the most costly to our environment.

There are lots of examples out there for us to use to show how insensitive we're being to the environment.. The Humvee, the H1 and even to a lesser extent the H2 are all good examples. The H3 is not. Pick something with a little more gusto, like an Avalanche or a Suburban/Tahoe/Yukon. A Yukon Denali was on par with a Hummer H2, in terms of both the niche it filled and the gas it consumed (minus the v-peen factor). The Denali is still here, the H2 is not. Its time to move on.

Please, pick your battles and stop whacking this dead horse just because its name is Hummer. There's a lot worse out there, and believe me, there's a lot more Avalanches and Yukons on the road than there are Hummers.

Just my $1.35.

-Aikon

p.s. I'm not picking on GM, I just choose to write about what I know.

"Now, as we all can see, pension and health care obligations are eating GM alive."

Washington Post

"The carmaker is saddled with a $1,600-per-vehicle handicap in so-called legacy costs, mostly retiree health and pension benefits"

Business Week

The Cadillac XLR is the first vehicle I know of that had these features.

Yep, only in Canada the LaCrosse is called the Allure.

http://www.gmcanada.com/english/vehicles/2005/buic k/allure/

I only know this since I rented one and wanted to know a little about it.

Crappy car, btw.

Car manufacturers do it all the time. Classic nameplates on new vehicles that have nothing in common with the originals.

Chevrolet Impala
Dodge Charger
Hummer H2
Hummer H3

I heard people in the UK saying that years ago when the car first came out there. Then I saw one when I was visiting and certainly wouldn't wanted to park one perpendicular to the kerb. I would say it's longer than most cars are wide, especially in Europe where the cars are smaller. Every one I saw was parked parallel to the kerb. The article claims it is 8 feet long, yet even a large vehicle like a Hummer H2 is less than seven feet wide.

Probably Daimler-Chrysler.

Possibly not!

They are selling the motor-wheel, you can find more information about it on the web site of a Hydro-Quebec subsidary M4.

The project of building a complete car from scratch was abandonned because it needs massive investments. They figured it would be easier to find partners and license this technology. GM bought a license.

Another reason why they prefer licensing the technology is that is may be not a great idea to put all this weight in the wheel. Taking a bump could easily destroy the suspension.

Hindsight is 20/20. When the TLDs were implemented the internet hardly existed. There was no concept of how revolutionary this would be. The borders were (are?) still meaningful.

You think geography means so little but it does indeed have meaning. From a marketing point of view, companies big and small still want to often want to address a regional group of people. I heard in an interview that McDonalds Canada doesn't want to waste its advertising budget by spending on things that largely targets Americans. In a way this makes a lot of sense (it is also short-sighted.)

The geographic TLDs could have been used much more wisely than they are. Anybody care to tell me why we have gmcanada.com when http://gm.ca would make much more sense? General Motors isn't the only guilty party for doing stupid things like this. I don't know if the problem was that GM didn't think of http://gm.ca? Or the more likely case that I've heard horror stories about, the Canadian registrar and how slow they are. Looking at their application form I can imagine the horror stories are true.

Geographic top level domains were and are a smart idea for organizing the domain system. You might think they were more useful had Internic been a little more intelligent and found a way to get customers to implement hierarchical domain names. That's what this system was meant for but instead in 90% of cases we have a flat dumb structure. www.variable.com. It could have been so much more useful, and we could have avoided much of the cybersquatting issues if Internic had been a little more clever.