prius stuff

[jwgh]

At dinner tonight people were talking about the environmental cost of owning a Prius vs. other cars, so I thought I'd link to this essay: http://tongodeon.livejournal.com/606261.html

(Oh, I should note that I don't own a hybrid car myself, even though i wrote a song about them. My sister has one though.)

Comments

My shorthand analysis

[notr.livejournal.com]

all along has been that the price of pretty much anything eventually goes back almost entirely to energy, and a little bit to intrinsic value of other natural resources like metals (whose cost also includes large energy costs)--the labor costs, taxes, profits, etc. go back into buying other products, whose labor costs etc. I figure, if the overall operating costs break even, it's done just a little better in energy cost. When I needed a new car, we saw that the Civic was about $2k more with the hybrid engine, and computed at the $2-ish gas prices of the time that, even with my wife's long commute then (if she took the new car and I took her old one), it would take about 12 years for it to break even.

Of course, a mitigating factor I'm ignoring here is the residual value of the battery when the car is worn out. If Toyota's "recycling bounty" of $200 is really fair market value, though, I wonder if there can be much more than that to be recovered. I guess we'll find out in a few years as the first generation of hybrid cars start to reach end of life.

[patrickd2007.livejournal.com]

Hopefully in the future hybrid prices will be coming down too. There is an energy bill in congress now that calls for a fuel economy standard of 35 miles per gallon by the year 2020. Lobbyists are trying to have the removed, but I'm working wit ha group to try and make sure that doesn't happen. There is a petition here http://energybill2007.us .