Air filters, which have fuck-all to do with emissions. Exhaust systems, which provided they are after the catalytic converter, also have fuck-all to do with emissions
Guess what - air filters and post-cat exhaust are not legislated by CARB. Everything in between is. And for good reason - 98% of the parts I've seen for sale that modify something between those two points are generally aimed at "improving" horsepower by removing emissions equipment. Good on you for doing your research.
I'm all for saving the environment, but not through creating an absolute nightmare of a patchwork of emissions regulations for automakers
Again, you fail to comprehend what has been allowed. CARB (and only CARB) may be allowed to legislate CO2 emissions from vehicles. There will be no patchwork. There will only be two standards. If your state doesn't like the CARB stanards, it can follow federal standards. Just like they (about a dozen IIRC) do now.
Or perhaps something serious happened in your lane ahead so you had to change lanes in the intersection (Which is also illegal, but, again, not running a red light), and the other lane was full.
Depends on where you are. As long as it's safe, it's not illegal to do so in California at least.
Linux often can't keep up with the rapid rate of new hardware flooding the market.
No, this isn't Linux's problem. The problem is that hardware manufactures either don't bother writing Linux drivers themselves, or they don't bother releasing specifications so that Linux kernel hackers can easily write drivers.
The most expensive component for PHEVs and EVs is the battery. Luckily, battery prices have been steadily dropping at a rate of 50% or so every couple years.
Large batteries should be in a price range which makes PHEVs and EVs just about affordable in 2-5 years from now. Hopefully by then, it's not too late.
While I would be one of the first in line for a PHEV Prius, I would not count on them being sold to the masses next year. Maybe by the fall of 2010 if we're lucky.
Toyota will be doing more fleet testing later this year and Panasonic (Toyota's battery JV partner) is supposed to be ramping up Lithium battery later this year too - I hope that means that Toyota is planning on selling PHEVs in 2010.
Bah - the 2009 TDI is not any better than the 2006 in fuel economy. If anything, it tends to be worse because of the extra emissions control equipment used to drastically reduce NOx and soot emissions.
Fuel economy of the 2006 and 2009 TDIs are very similar in practice with the 2006 slightly edging out the 2009. Both averaging a bit over 40mpg according to http://fueleconomy.gov/
Even though I'm a big fan of hybrid and electric vehicle technology, there have been a lot more than just 3 hybrid batteries that have been replaced due to failures.
That said, battery failures aren't common. They are most common on the first generation hybrids and the issues that caused those failures have been mostly resolved in later generation hybrids making battery failures much less likely.
The batteries are made in Japan, so I don't know why you're making any reference to Canada, except for that old nickel mine there (and the vast majority of nickel from that mine goes into making steel, not batteries).
Burning gasoline and diesel fuel is horrendous for the environment and they're expensive.
Batteries are not that expensive - $2-3k for a new one. They are warranted for 10 years and 150k miles in CARB states. Used (but perfectly good) batteries can be had for well under $1k from the salvage yard.
Batteries are not horrendous for the environment, either. They are all easily recycled - the manufactures will take them from you when they die to be recycled. Toyota will even pay you a couple hundred bucks to take it off your hands.
The biggest problem with hybrid trucks is that power demands of trucks are HUGE when compared to a typical vehicle.
For example, if we take your example of trying to slow down a truck on a long grade, the batteries would need to be huge to absorb all that power. Also, hybrids tend to be most effective in start-stop type driving. On long hauls diesels, a hybrid system typically won't improve fuel economy much. (Note: it does work effectively on gas hybrids where you are able to run the engine on the atkinson cycle and then use the hybrid components to make up for the reduction in peak power).
That being said, we are seeing trucks being hybridized to provide power for accessories while parked. Idle emissions are a big problem as truckers often have to stop and rest - and while they're doing that they are camped out in the truck.
We're going to see more hybrid and electric trucks on the road soon for short-haul and delivery type applications.
You do realize that this will only effect hybrid or electric cars right?
Actually, you'd be surprised at how much electricity a modern vehicle draws at highway speeds. And as more and more parts move to electric power from engine power to facility things like auto-start-stop without compromising functionality, those power draws will only go up.
For example, a typical car today will draw about 50-60 amps cruising on the highway. At 14.4v, that's over 700 watts.
Now, lets put make the AC compressor, coolant pump, power steering pump, and the oil pump electrically driven instead of driven off the engine, and power draw will go up even more and we'll find that the average of 1kW that these shocks can recover won't be even close to enough power to drive all these accessories.
Luckily, there are also companies working on producing thermoelectric generators that are run off exhaust heat to recover energy that is lost there. So far, it seems that they're able to recover about 1kW while cruising as well.
We'll be looking at power as well but WD claims this drive drops in somewhere around 7 Watts under read/write load and 5 Watts at idle.
That's about 50% less power than 7200rpm drives that hold 1TB which typically idle around 7-8 watts and peak around 10-11 watts. It's a little bit more than the WD GP 1TB drive, I think about 20% more. Certainly in terms of storage/watt, it's the class leader.
I've used Geode systems in tiny little ALIX boxes that measure about 6"x6"x1" and then installed pfSense on them for firewall duties.
They work great and have enough grunt to push 50-80Mbps. More than enough for your typical internet connection. With better NICs (the ones embedded on the ALIX don't do much in the way of CPU offload or interrupt mitigation) it could push more. And they do this while drawing about 4 watts. Yeah, seriously!
CPU power is a bit lacking if you need to push a bunch of VPN traffic, but if you do, a cheap Sempron based system will push a lot of VPN traffic while drawing only about 30w total if you build it right.
For as long as I've been following (and been ever so slightly involved in) Linux development, oh, say from the mid-late 90s, Alan Cox has nearly always been there hacking primarily on device drivers.
Intel has steadily picked up more Linux kernel hackers over the past 5 years or so who seem to focus on device drivers (e1000 NIC drivers) but also employ others who have very broad-based and deep knowledge of the kernel. Alan Cox seems to be a good fit with his long history of kernel development and focus on low-level drivers.
So good for Alan for changing things up a bit, and good for Intel for hiring another full-time Linux developer! Hopefully this leaves room for Red Hat to pick up another developer in his place.
Well, I don't have a lot of experience with them, only having had 3 of the 7200.11 1TB drives.
But I only bought two and one of the first two died after 3-4 days of operation with a huge number of sector read errors. I tried rewriting the entire drive and that helped for a day before it went kaput again.
Good thing I bought them specifically to use in a RAID1 array, but having to wait 4-5 days for my RMA to be processed did worry me while running in degraded mode. Luckily, I did have backups in case the other one failed.
That said, if you get a good one, they are fast and fairly quiet. At the fast end of the disk you can write over 100MB/s to the disk which drops to 60-65MB or so at the slow end of the disk.
I'm hoping the early deaths are just a residual of some manufacturing defect and doesn't mean that the drive will fail more often down the road. At least the drive has a 5 year warranty.
You can already buy 100% electric trucks from Smith Electric Vehicles. I'm not sure if you can buy these in the US yet or not, but I know you can buy them in the UK.
Envia also produces PHEVs based on Ford pickups and is currently taking fleet orders.
Even though the sources you listed are our largest sources of oil, that does not mean that we do not send an insignificant amount of money to other countries which are considerably less friendly.
Anything we can do to reduce our oil consumption can also be used then to minimize or eliminate oil obtained from unfriendly sources in preference to friendly sources would be beneficial.
Some things to keep in mind about the current Prius:
When it's reading 99mpg, the engine may or may not be spinning, and you may or not be burning gasoline. A number of factors come into play:
Vehicle speed -at 42+mph, the engine must spin to avoid overrevving the generators - if you coast down a steep hill you will feel the engine spin up once you hit 42mph
Engine temperature -the Prius will burn gas to make sure the catalytic converters are nice and warm - reducing fuel economy to reduce other emissions
Battery charge -the higher the battery charge, the more likely the Prius will shut off the engine to use stored energy from the battery
Without a way to charge the batteries from a more efficient power source, in general, forcing the Prius to run solely off battery power can actually reduce your overall fuel economy because of the conversion losses that come in to play when charging the battery from the engine. The Prius is pretty good at deciding when to use the engine on it's own.
That said, you can buy an aftermarket EV mode switch for the Prius which allows you to drain your battery and run the Prius in pure EV mode (under certain conditions - if you exceed certain conditions I listed earlier the Prius will not let you engage EV mode).
Also keep in mind that the reason Toyota is able to guarantee the stock battery for 8 years / 100k miles nationwide and 10 years / 150k miles for CARB states, is that they take numerous measures to protect the stock battery from abuse.
This means that they coddle the battery, only allowing the cells to remain within a narrow 40%-80% charge state and limiting current to/from the battery. Maintaining the narrow charge state is crucial to extended battery life as the more often the battery is discharged close to empty and the more often the battery is charged to full or nearly full, the faster you reduce the lifetime of the battery.
Yep, how many more people would turn off their machines when they weren't using them if it only took 5-10 seconds to boot instead of the minutes it seems to take now?
As far as added cost of batteries, the Prius my parents own now has more than sufficient battery power, all it needs is a plug-in...
Not really. The stock Prius battery only has enough power for a couple miles of all electric power.
Not sufficient unless you only plan on going around the block at low speeds.
You can buy a PHEV kit for the Prius which gets you 30-40 miles of mostly electric power. Depending on your driving, you will typically get 100mpg+ during that period, and even significantly more if you keep speeds low.
Drawback is that it costs $10k, but if it were integrated into the car by Toyota, the additional cost would be much less (I'd estimate the additional cost to be appx $5k), and Toyota would be able to make additional modifications to allow the car to make better use of the electric power while it's available.
I would quite happily pay a $5k premium on a car that had 30-40 miles of mostly electric range. I might even pay more if it were integrated from the factory. But as it is now, I'd probably want to pick up the cheapest used Prius available to convert, which unfortunately are in very high demand right now. The only Prius you can find for $10k is totalled.
The RAV4 EV which they discontinued and even tried to have destroyed was a perfectly fine vehicle, and many are still running today. I wish they would just re-introduce that vehicle, perhaps with modern batteries.
Heck, Toyota re-furbed a couple of RAV4 EVs just recently for more testing in Portland, OR.
The technology is there to drop in some modern batteries and upgrade the electronics so that it will do 0-60mph in 10 seconds and travel 100 miles at 70mph... Those types of specs would be sufficient for the vast majority of commute and errand type running. I bet you'd sell a couple thousand of those a month or more depending on the price.
If you think of a battery as a bucket where the battery charge is indicated by the amount of water in the bucket.
Now imagine that you are trying to fill that bucket as fast as possible, which means using a firehose, and that spilling any water means damaging the bucket.
Getting the bucket close to full without making a mess is a lot easier than getting it 100% full which means you need to slow the fill down to trickle to make sure you don't over flow or splash water everywhere.
Charging the last 10% of battery capacity is difficult because the battery does not readily accept a charge as it's nearly full. This means to get the last 10% of capacity you need to slow down the charge rate, which means that in this case, it may only take 10 minutes to get to 90% full, but it may take another 30-60 minutes to charge up that last 10% without damaging the battery.
Last half of that comment disappeared somehow. Should have used "preview".
I'll reply to this one instead of both...
Most Volkswagen TDI-equipped cars will get 40+ MPG at highway speeds.
No argument there.
If I drive 60 MPH with the cruise control, I can consistently get high-40's in my 2004 VW New Beetle TDI.
If I drive 60mph in my Prius with cruise control, I can consistently get 55-60mpg in my 2008 Prius (same fuel economy for the 2004-2009 Prius). But my normal driving speeds are 70-75 where I consistently average high 40's, significantly faster than 60mpg. And while doing it, emit far fewer pollutants such as particulates, NOx, CO and because fuel economy is better, not to mention gasonline's lower CO2 density, gasoline has about 13% less CO2 per gallon compared to diesel, which means that if you get 50mpg in your TDI, that's about the same as 56mpg in a gas car.
According to many press articles on the subject, VW's TDI engines that they are making for the 2009 model year produce significantly less emissions than comparable gasoline engines. "BlueTec"/"clean diesel" diesel engines across the board produce more torque, burn less fuel, and produce fewer emissions than any gasoline engine.
While diesel engines may be more efficient than regular gas engines, they still pollute more. The latest diesels just barely squeak by the minimum Tier II Bin 5 requirements. Please reference your sources that indicate that they emit fewer pollutants than gas cars.
So lets compare the 2009 Jetta TDI to the 2009 Toyota Corolla, for example. According to fueleconomy.gov, the Corolla is actually slightly more efficient than the TDI, but I know that the TDI will typically do better than what the EPA rates it as, so lets just say that the TDI beats the Corolla in the energy consumption comparison.
No official emissions ratings that I can find, but it appears that both should fall under Tier 2 Bin 5 emissions ratings, except for Corollas which meet the more stringent CARB ULEV II emissions ratings so are slightly cleaner. Let's call them a match.
So in total emissions, the TDI probably beats the Corolla. But then again, the TDI costs more, too.
But if you compare it to a hybrid like the Prius or Civic Hybrid, those cars will beat the TDI.
It's also worth noting that diesel-powered cars last longer, are easier to maintain high efficiency, and as a rule require fewer oil changes and other routine maintenance.
One could easily argue that diesel-powered cars are not more reliable. I know of people who have had plenty of problems with their VW diesels, but maybe that's just a VW problem. As far as maintenance, I don't think you are correct, either. Maintenance requirements are very similar between gas and diesel cars. Historically I know that diesels can be harder on oil due to the "dirty" nature of diesel, but I'm sure this is not much of an issue on modern diesels.
Lastly, they don't have a trunk-full of heavy metals that will need to be recycled or disposed of safely.
Modern NiMH and Lithium batteries are legal to dispose of in the regular trash, they are not toxic. Though recycling them is definitely recommended. Toyota even offers a small bounty of a couple hundred bucks to return the battery to them for recycling.
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Bullshit. Only true if your "eco-friendly" meter ignores NOx, CO and other harmful pollutants and only counts CO2 emissions.
That's the whole point - to get all those smart scientists to figure out how to make dark paint that reflects heat.
Even if they don't end up enabling the legislation - who wouldn't spring $150 for the keep your car a bit cooler in the summer for no energy option?
Guess what - air filters and post-cat exhaust are not legislated by CARB. Everything in between is. And for good reason - 98% of the parts I've seen for sale that modify something between those two points are generally aimed at "improving" horsepower by removing emissions equipment. Good on you for doing your research.
Again, you fail to comprehend what has been allowed. CARB (and only CARB) may be allowed to legislate CO2 emissions from vehicles. There will be no patchwork. There will only be two standards. If your state doesn't like the CARB stanards, it can follow federal standards. Just like they (about a dozen IIRC) do now.
Depends on where you are. As long as it's safe, it's not illegal to do so in California at least.
No, this isn't Linux's problem. The problem is that hardware manufactures either don't bother writing Linux drivers themselves, or they don't bother releasing specifications so that Linux kernel hackers can easily write drivers.
The most expensive component for PHEVs and EVs is the battery. Luckily, battery prices have been steadily dropping at a rate of 50% or so every couple years.
Large batteries should be in a price range which makes PHEVs and EVs just about affordable in 2-5 years from now. Hopefully by then, it's not too late.
While I would be one of the first in line for a PHEV Prius, I would not count on them being sold to the masses next year. Maybe by the fall of 2010 if we're lucky.
Toyota will be doing more fleet testing later this year and Panasonic (Toyota's battery JV partner) is supposed to be ramping up Lithium battery later this year too - I hope that means that Toyota is planning on selling PHEVs in 2010.
Bah - the 2009 TDI is not any better than the 2006 in fuel economy. If anything, it tends to be worse because of the extra emissions control equipment used to drastically reduce NOx and soot emissions.
Fuel economy of the 2006 and 2009 TDIs are very similar in practice with the 2006 slightly edging out the 2009. Both averaging a bit over 40mpg according to http://fueleconomy.gov/
Even though I'm a big fan of hybrid and electric vehicle technology, there have been a lot more than just 3 hybrid batteries that have been replaced due to failures.
That said, battery failures aren't common. They are most common on the first generation hybrids and the issues that caused those failures have been mostly resolved in later generation hybrids making battery failures much less likely.
The batteries are made in Japan, so I don't know why you're making any reference to Canada, except for that old nickel mine there (and the vast majority of nickel from that mine goes into making steel, not batteries).
Burning gasoline and diesel fuel is horrendous for the environment and they're expensive.
Batteries are not that expensive - $2-3k for a new one. They are warranted for 10 years and 150k miles in CARB states. Used (but perfectly good) batteries can be had for well under $1k from the salvage yard.
Batteries are not horrendous for the environment, either. They are all easily recycled - the manufactures will take them from you when they die to be recycled. Toyota will even pay you a couple hundred bucks to take it off your hands.
The biggest problem with hybrid trucks is that power demands of trucks are HUGE when compared to a typical vehicle.
For example, if we take your example of trying to slow down a truck on a long grade, the batteries would need to be huge to absorb all that power. Also, hybrids tend to be most effective in start-stop type driving. On long hauls diesels, a hybrid system typically won't improve fuel economy much. (Note: it does work effectively on gas hybrids where you are able to run the engine on the atkinson cycle and then use the hybrid components to make up for the reduction in peak power).
That being said, we are seeing trucks being hybridized to provide power for accessories while parked. Idle emissions are a big problem as truckers often have to stop and rest - and while they're doing that they are camped out in the truck.
We're going to see more hybrid and electric trucks on the road soon for short-haul and delivery type applications.
Actually, you'd be surprised at how much electricity a modern vehicle draws at highway speeds. And as more and more parts move to electric power from engine power to facility things like auto-start-stop without compromising functionality, those power draws will only go up.
For example, a typical car today will draw about 50-60 amps cruising on the highway. At 14.4v, that's over 700 watts.
Now, lets put make the AC compressor, coolant pump, power steering pump, and the oil pump electrically driven instead of driven off the engine, and power draw will go up even more and we'll find that the average of 1kW that these shocks can recover won't be even close to enough power to drive all these accessories.
Luckily, there are also companies working on producing thermoelectric generators that are run off exhaust heat to recover energy that is lost there. So far, it seems that they're able to recover about 1kW while cruising as well.
You missed it. From TFA:
That's about 50% less power than 7200rpm drives that hold 1TB which typically idle around 7-8 watts and peak around 10-11 watts. It's a little bit more than the WD GP 1TB drive, I think about 20% more. Certainly in terms of storage/watt, it's the class leader.
I've used Geode systems in tiny little ALIX boxes that measure about 6"x6"x1" and then installed pfSense on them for firewall duties.
They work great and have enough grunt to push 50-80Mbps. More than enough for your typical internet connection. With better NICs (the ones embedded on the ALIX don't do much in the way of CPU offload or interrupt mitigation) it could push more. And they do this while drawing about 4 watts. Yeah, seriously!
CPU power is a bit lacking if you need to push a bunch of VPN traffic, but if you do, a cheap Sempron based system will push a lot of VPN traffic while drawing only about 30w total if you build it right.
Yep, that's exactly what I was thinking.
For as long as I've been following (and been ever so slightly involved in) Linux development, oh, say from the mid-late 90s, Alan Cox has nearly always been there hacking primarily on device drivers.
Intel has steadily picked up more Linux kernel hackers over the past 5 years or so who seem to focus on device drivers (e1000 NIC drivers) but also employ others who have very broad-based and deep knowledge of the kernel. Alan Cox seems to be a good fit with his long history of kernel development and focus on low-level drivers.
So good for Alan for changing things up a bit, and good for Intel for hiring another full-time Linux developer! Hopefully this leaves room for Red Hat to pick up another developer in his place.
Well, I don't have a lot of experience with them, only having had 3 of the 7200.11 1TB drives.
But I only bought two and one of the first two died after 3-4 days of operation with a huge number of sector read errors. I tried rewriting the entire drive and that helped for a day before it went kaput again.
Good thing I bought them specifically to use in a RAID1 array, but having to wait 4-5 days for my RMA to be processed did worry me while running in degraded mode. Luckily, I did have backups in case the other one failed.
That said, if you get a good one, they are fast and fairly quiet. At the fast end of the disk you can write over 100MB/s to the disk which drops to 60-65MB or so at the slow end of the disk.
I'm hoping the early deaths are just a residual of some manufacturing defect and doesn't mean that the drive will fail more often down the road. At least the drive has a 5 year warranty.
You can already buy 100% electric trucks from Smith Electric Vehicles. I'm not sure if you can buy these in the US yet or not, but I know you can buy them in the UK.
Envia also produces PHEVs based on Ford pickups and is currently taking fleet orders.
Even though the sources you listed are our largest sources of oil, that does not mean that we do not send an insignificant amount of money to other countries which are considerably less friendly.
Anything we can do to reduce our oil consumption can also be used then to minimize or eliminate oil obtained from unfriendly sources in preference to friendly sources would be beneficial.
Some things to keep in mind about the current Prius:
When it's reading 99mpg, the engine may or may not be spinning, and you may or not be burning gasoline. A number of factors come into play:
Without a way to charge the batteries from a more efficient power source, in general, forcing the Prius to run solely off battery power can actually reduce your overall fuel economy because of the conversion losses that come in to play when charging the battery from the engine. The Prius is pretty good at deciding when to use the engine on it's own.
That said, you can buy an aftermarket EV mode switch for the Prius which allows you to drain your battery and run the Prius in pure EV mode (under certain conditions - if you exceed certain conditions I listed earlier the Prius will not let you engage EV mode).
Also keep in mind that the reason Toyota is able to guarantee the stock battery for 8 years / 100k miles nationwide and 10 years / 150k miles for CARB states, is that they take numerous measures to protect the stock battery from abuse.
This means that they coddle the battery, only allowing the cells to remain within a narrow 40%-80% charge state and limiting current to/from the battery. Maintaining the narrow charge state is crucial to extended battery life as the more often the battery is discharged close to empty and the more often the battery is charged to full or nearly full, the faster you reduce the lifetime of the battery.
Yep, how many more people would turn off their machines when they weren't using them if it only took 5-10 seconds to boot instead of the minutes it seems to take now?
Not really. The stock Prius battery only has enough power for a couple miles of all electric power.
Not sufficient unless you only plan on going around the block at low speeds.
You can buy a PHEV kit for the Prius which gets you 30-40 miles of mostly electric power. Depending on your driving, you will typically get 100mpg+ during that period, and even significantly more if you keep speeds low.
Drawback is that it costs $10k, but if it were integrated into the car by Toyota, the additional cost would be much less (I'd estimate the additional cost to be appx $5k), and Toyota would be able to make additional modifications to allow the car to make better use of the electric power while it's available.
I would quite happily pay a $5k premium on a car that had 30-40 miles of mostly electric range. I might even pay more if it were integrated from the factory. But as it is now, I'd probably want to pick up the cheapest used Prius available to convert, which unfortunately are in very high demand right now. The only Prius you can find for $10k is totalled.
Heck, Toyota re-furbed a couple of RAV4 EVs just recently for more testing in Portland, OR.
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/09/24/toyota-brings-refurbished-rav4-evs-to-portland-for-infrastructuc/
The technology is there to drop in some modern batteries and upgrade the electronics so that it will do 0-60mph in 10 seconds and travel 100 miles at 70mph... Those types of specs would be sufficient for the vast majority of commute and errand type running. I bet you'd sell a couple thousand of those a month or more depending on the price.
If you think of a battery as a bucket where the battery charge is indicated by the amount of water in the bucket.
Now imagine that you are trying to fill that bucket as fast as possible, which means using a firehose, and that spilling any water means damaging the bucket.
Getting the bucket close to full without making a mess is a lot easier than getting it 100% full which means you need to slow the fill down to trickle to make sure you don't over flow or splash water everywhere.
Charging the last 10% of battery capacity is difficult because the battery does not readily accept a charge as it's nearly full. This means to get the last 10% of capacity you need to slow down the charge rate, which means that in this case, it may only take 10 minutes to get to 90% full, but it may take another 30-60 minutes to charge up that last 10% without damaging the battery.
I'll reply to this one instead of both...
No argument there.
If I drive 60mph in my Prius with cruise control, I can consistently get 55-60mpg in my 2008 Prius (same fuel economy for the 2004-2009 Prius). But my normal driving speeds are 70-75 where I consistently average high 40's, significantly faster than 60mpg. And while doing it, emit far fewer pollutants such as particulates, NOx, CO and because fuel economy is better, not to mention gasonline's lower CO2 density, gasoline has about 13% less CO2 per gallon compared to diesel, which means that if you get 50mpg in your TDI, that's about the same as 56mpg in a gas car.
While diesel engines may be more efficient than regular gas engines, they still pollute more. The latest diesels just barely squeak by the minimum Tier II Bin 5 requirements. Please reference your sources that indicate that they emit fewer pollutants than gas cars.
So lets compare the 2009 Jetta TDI to the 2009 Toyota Corolla, for example. According to fueleconomy.gov, the Corolla is actually slightly more efficient than the TDI, but I know that the TDI will typically do better than what the EPA rates it as, so lets just say that the TDI beats the Corolla in the energy consumption comparison.
No official emissions ratings that I can find, but it appears that both should fall under Tier 2 Bin 5 emissions ratings, except for Corollas which meet the more stringent CARB ULEV II emissions ratings so are slightly cleaner. Let's call them a match.
So in total emissions, the TDI probably beats the Corolla. But then again, the TDI costs more, too.
But if you compare it to a hybrid like the Prius or Civic Hybrid, those cars will beat the TDI.
One could easily argue that diesel-powered cars are not more reliable. I know of people who have had plenty of problems with their VW diesels, but maybe that's just a VW problem. As far as maintenance, I don't think you are correct, either. Maintenance requirements are very similar between gas and diesel cars. Historically I know that diesels can be harder on oil due to the "dirty" nature of diesel, but I'm sure this is not much of an issue on modern diesels.
Modern NiMH and Lithium batteries are legal to dispose of in the regular trash, they are not toxic. Though recycling them is definitely recommended. Toyota even offers a small bounty of a couple hundred bucks to return the battery to them for recycling.
My Prius averages ~45mpg at about 75mph+ on long trips. Low-mid 40s if I go 80mph.
Please find me a car sold on the market today with as much room as the Prius and still gets 40+mpg at high speeds with emissions as low as it.
The new Jetta TDI gets close just looking at mpg, but still pollutes more, diesel costs more than gas, not to mention has higher CO2/gallon content.
Perhaps the 2010 Honda Insight will match the Prius, but then the 2010 Prius is also due out around the same time (late spring next year).