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Hummer Greener Than Prius?
J adds:
The Prius's mediocre cost-per-mile is due mainly to CNW Research assigning the car a short expected lifetime: 109,000 miles. Nobody knows where this number comes from because CNW has not published details about its derivation. If a car will not last very long, then of course its energy cost per mile is high.
Back in July 2006, when CNW's study "Dust to Dust" had just been published (and which remains, unchanged, the original source for today's news), I emailed its president, Art Spinella:
Hello,
I'm with the tech news and discussion site Slashdot.org. One of our readers submitted a story about your Dust to Dust study.
According to Wikipedia, the Prius comes with a 150,000 mile warranty in California and a few other states; 100,000 elsewhere.
On p. 21 and p. 40 of your report I see that you estimate the average Prius will be "removed from the streets... and sent for disposal" at 109,000 miles. Can you explain how you arrived at this figure?
Thank you.
I did not receive a reply.
My question was about the cost-per-mile denominator; here's another critique questioning the numerator.
Its not honest because they pulled these numbers out of their ass. They produced these studies early in the life of the Prius back when there were fears of it only lasting 100K miles. This has been proved wrong as they all have lasted 200K or more and the clock is still going.
I also like the fact that they say "any physicist will tell you it takes more energy to get an object moving than to keep it moving".
So, what they're saying is, the majority of the tank of gas I use on a 400 mile trip is getting my car from a stop up to highway speed.
I think I'm going to vomit now.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
And especially if the article tells outright lies to make its (dubious) case:
From the article: "The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the 'dead zone' around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.
The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius' battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist's nightmare. "
Now compare that to Wikipedia's entry on Greater Sudbury:
"The ore deposits in Sudbury are part of a large geological structure known as the Sudbury Basin, believed to be the remnants of a 1.85-billion year old meteorite impact crater. Sudbury ore contains profitable amounts of many elements, especially transition metals, including platinum. It also contains an unusually high concentration of sulfur. When nickel-copper ore is smelted, this sulfur is released into the environment, where it is toxic to vegetation. Carried aloft, it combines with atmospheric water to form sulfuric acid. This contaminates atmospheric water, resulting in a phenomenon known as acid rain.
As a result, Sudbury was widely, although not entirely accurately, known for many years as a wasteland. In parts of the city, vegetation was devastated, both by acid rain and by logging to provide fuel for early smelting techniques, as well as wood for the reconstruction of Chicago after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The resulting erosion exposed bedrock, which was charred in most places to a pitted, dark black appearance. There was not a complete lack of vegetation in the region, however. Paper birch and wild blueberry are notable examples of plants which thrived in the acidic soils, and even during the worst years of the city's environmental damage, not all parts of the city were equally affected.
During the Apollo manned lunar exploration program, NASA astronauts trained in Sudbury, to become familiar with shatter cones, a rare rock formation connected with meteorite impacts. However, the popular misconception that they were visiting Sudbury because it purportedly resembled the lifeless surface of the moon dogged the city for years.
In the late 1970s, private, public, and commercial interests combined to establish an unprecedented "regreening" effort. Lime was spread over the charred soil of the Sudbury region by hand and by aircraft. Seeds of wild grasses and other vegetation were also spread. In twenty years, over three million trees were planted. The ecology of the Sudbury region has recovered dramatically, due both to the regreening program and improved mining practices, and in 1992 the city was given the "Local Government Honours Award" by the United Nations, in honour of its innovative community-based strategies in environmental rehabilitation. More recently, the city has begun to rehabilitate the slag heaps that surround the Copper Cliff smelter area, with the planting of grass and trees."
Actually, I'm from Sudbury (hello from the land of good beer and snow, eh?) and Inco has instituted massive re-greening projects since back in the 70's. Also, a large amount of the damage done to the area has less to do with modern smelting, being the result of the old HUGE open-pit smelting (aka heap roasting) heated by many thousands or maybe even millions of trees cut from the local forest. As far as i know, that type of practice went out in the 20's. The sulfur-dioxide would then just float away as a cloud right near the ground. VERY SAFE haha.
In any case, except for a in few areas the trees and soil have been/are being restored, and NASA would be sorely disappointed if they were looking for a few thousand acres of moon today.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/2/12/115426/ 732
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Nobody knows because no battery failed yet due to old age. The clock is going for 8 years now. The battery on the new Prius is under warranty for either 8 or 10 years IIRC.
Thirty years ago it was rare to expect any car, let alone a US built one, to last much more than 150k. Manufacturing has greatly improved. Even manufacturers that build ``below average'' vehicles are putting out product that lasts far longer than the bad old days. There is no prima facie reason that a Hummer wouldn't last for 300k miles given that, unlike the Prius, Hummers don't have uber-expensive batteries that will almost certainly need to be replaced at 100k miles.
Only you're totally wrong. Just one example: "Grant -- a one-time car salesman who, when he's not driving, is studying to be an executive business coach -- is on his third Prius now. (Toyota, seizing a chance to evaluate the car's durability, took his original back after he'd driven it 200,000 miles in 25 months and exchanged it with a 2003 model, fully outfitted for fares.) Compared to conventional taxis, his current 2004 Prius saves between $900 and $1,100 per month in fuel costs alone, and his repair bills -- thanks to automotive innovations such as regenerative braking, which reduces wear and tear on the brake pads -- have been cut by more than half."No battery has ever been replaced so far due to age related failure, and there are certainly cars out there with more than 100k miles on them. Here are more:
http://newsdesk.inl.gov/press_releases/2004/06-23
They may be the first to have crossed 200K miles with a Prius. Taxi service is one of the hardest uses for a car. When Toyota bought it back for a teardown to study extended wear, it still had the factory battery and other drivetrain components.
As more normal service pushes others over 200K, the results have been mostly the same.
The Prius was also designed for (_relatively_) green manufacturing techniques, including a less nasty painting process.
The Prius is also an SULEV, news to me if the Hummer is as well.
I can't talk about the rest of Latin America, but this is not true for Mexico. While the import rules are slowly being loosened, Mexico is extremely protective of its new car market (of course made up of American and Japanese cars) and importing a used car into the country is a nightmare, unless you are in one of their "free trade" zones right on the border. Even those have to be ~5 years old or so. Moving them further in is right damn near impossible unless you're willing to pay enough taxes to rival what you paid for the thing to begin with.
The reason for this is of course to keep the "straight" auto importers and dealers happy by allowing them to set artificially high prices on new cars without any competition whatsoever.
Your theory might be correct for other countries, maybe even outside of the Americas, but it's not for Mexico. The amount of cars in the free trade zones would not make a dent on the volume of vehicles that land on the "used" circuit here in the US every year. If you ever travel down to Mexico City or one of the larger cities in the interior of the country, keep your eyes open for a used Pontiac or Mercury. You won't find any.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Considering the Prius maximum lifetime was off by 3x, that's a pretty biased "correction" you're doing there. Plus, I'm not sure how "half-way-or-so wrong" turns $3.25 into $2 (a decrease of 60%) but only turns $1.95 into $2 (an increase of 2%). How is this meeting half-way? You're biasing it by assuming the Hummer estimate must be way 30x more accurate than the Prius estimate.
Anyway, using reversing their numbers:
Prius: $3.25 x 100,000 = $325,000
Hummer: $1.95 x 300,000 = $585,000
So, if the Prius gets 200,000, which seems more reasonable:
Prius: $325,000 / 200,000 = $1.625
Hummer: $585,000 / 300,000 = $1.95
That puts the Prius at 17% less. That's pretty significant.
And if you drop the Hummer down to 200,000?
Prius: $325,000 / 200,000 = $1.625
Hummer: $585,000 / 200,000 = $2.925
That puts the Prius at 56% less.
So really, the only way you could make the comparison look favorable to the Hummer was to use bullshit numbers. Which is what the study did. Very sad.
Why exactly to you believe the Hummer's lifespan is limited to 120,000 miles? Consumer Reports has consistently ranked hummer low in reliability ratings. The Prius on the other hand has very good reliablity ratings.
http://www.windmeadow.com/
From the reports I have read, the battery pack on the Prius typically lasts far longer than 150K miles. That is just the minimum guaranteed (at least in CA). Also, if the battery pack does fail, it is recycled. NiMH batteries are not really all that nasty for the environment. The 2005 model is estimated to last 150K miles, though I have read numerous reports of them lasting longer. Replacement cost is reportedly around $2K, even though a new battery pack lists for close to $6K. My guess is that this is due to the fact that Toyota is able to rebuild defective batteries at their factory, thus avoiding the high cost of replacing the nickel. Reports of the classic Prius being used as taxis in New York show problems with batteries, even at 250K miles.
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He'll never have to rebuild the engine if he performs regular maintenance. Diesels are hard to kill if you actually maintain them properly. I had an '84 Chevy K5 Blazer 4x4 with the 6.2L V8 diesel, and I sold it at 300,000 miles with the original engine and transmission (700R4 trans rebuilt once at 200K miles).
Newer transmissions are built much better than those found even ten years ago, especially the autos typically mated to newer diesel engines in trucks. Again, chances he'll need a rebuild are pretty slim with proper maintenance.
Ford doesn't use Cummins engines, they use PowerStroke diesels. Dodge uses Cummins in their trucks. I don't know what a "cummings" is.
It's becoming an old saw that anything that is energy efficient must take more energy to manufacture than it saves over its lifetime.
This is rarely accompanied by numbers.
Take CFLs: A good CFL lasts many times longer than an incandescent, but let's be conservative and say 3k hours for the CFL, 750 for the incandescent. That is conservative. Over that 3k hours, a 15W CFL will save 135 kWh compared to the incandescent. That's $13 at retail electricity rates, $6.50 at industrial rates. CFLs generally cost less than this to *buy*, so you can be damn sure the energy input is less than 135kWh. And that's not even considering the inputs to make, transport, etc. 4 incandescents.
There's no way the upfront energy costs of a CFL offset its savings. BTW same for PV; energy payback is ~2 years for something with a 20-50 lifetime. And that's with standard silicon; go thin-film or CIGS and its better. Wind turbines have a faster energy payback. And so on.
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No, they are NiMH batteries (LiIon planned for 2008 models). The batteries are kept between 20% and 80% SOC, so they are never fully discharged or fully charged - this increases their life enormously.
Here is what they ACTUALLY used for the lifetimes:
So, not only did they lowball the Prius at 109k, they put the H1 down for 379,000 miles. If you read the explanation of expected life, the author says:
So, basically, they have some kind of formula that they're not going to share with us. But just trust them.
This paper is really a hoot. You can get it from http://cnwmr.com/nss-folder/automotiveenergy/Dust% 20Zip%20Folder.zip
The first 300 or so pages are the explanation and tables. Then there's another 60 pages of the author answering emails. Yet nowhere in those 60 pages can I find anyone apparently asking for hard evidence that the 109k/379k numbers are anywhere in the ballpark. You would think more than a couple of people asked that. But maybe I missed it. Did I mention this went on for 60 pages?
And then the next 120 pages are disclosures, articles, correspondance, photos of cars, editorial cartoons and song lyrics. I am NOT joking.
NiMH batteries are almost entirely recycleable. The high-nickel product from currently primitive recycling processes can be used as an input to stainless steel manufacturing, but is only marginally economical for making new batteries. When used in making stainless steel, the recycled product displaces nickel that would be produced by new extraction, and IMHO, should be considered as a 100% offset to the environmental cost of the nickel used in the original construction of the battery.
Nickel is already expensive enough that if nickel-based battery production ramps up, the economic value of the nickel will make battery remanufacturing fully cost-effective. Additional research on the manufacturing and recycling processes are also likely to provide substantial cost improvements from where we stand today. I wouldn't be suprised to find in 5-10 years that nickel-based batteries enjoy the same "near-100%" closed-loop recycling ability that lead-acid batteries currently enjoy.
Regards,
Ross
First off, the HV batteries are warranted for 10 years/150K miles in CA and a few other states. This guy is at 280K miles BTW. http://john1701a.com/prius/owners/jesse3.htm
y /2004/hybrid.html.
They're also recycled. See http://www.toyota.com/about/environment/technolog
"Is there a recycling plan in place for nickel-metal hydride batteries?
Toyota has a comprehensive battery recycling program in place and has been recycling nickel-metal hydride batteries since the RAV4 Electric Vehicle was introduced in 1998. Every part of the battery, from the precious metals to the plastic, plates, steel case and the wiring, is recycled. To ensure that batteries come back to Toyota, each battery has a phone number on it to call for recycling information and dealers are paid a $200 "bounty" for each battery."