Who'da Thought?

[A. G. Olphart]

I didn't like these things due to their expense, complexity, and battery replacements down the road... Turns out there are environmental costs as well.

 

http://clubs.ccsu.edu/Recorder/editorial/print_item.asp?NewsID=188

 

 

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[Poundz9oh9]

WOW ... whodathunkit.? Good find!

[OlderThanMe]

So much for "let's save the enviroment by driving a hybrid" lol...

 

I'll drive my version of a "Hybrid"...

[e_racer1999]

wow, that's crazy...... let's make sure to keep this non-political so it doesn't get sent to the tool shed ..

 

anyway, i would think that once the manufacturing of hybrids becomes more commonplace, the manufacturers will consolidate a lot of the manufacturing. does anyone know the environmental drawbacks of manufacturing lithium-ion batteries? i'm surprised they're using NiCd or NiMH....

[Poundz9oh9]

Hydrogen Power FTMFW!

[Guest Death69]

lol! i gotta go slap my neighbor in the face. I have a lifted ( 22 inches) f350 and every time I jump (literally) in it, he tells me im killing mother nature. oh this is going to be sweet

[MrFancypants]

Wish they left the whole "mining bashing" crap alone. Everything in a car comes from a mine, Prius or not.

 

The damage from the superstacks in Sudbury was done decades ago before regulations and better scrubbing technology evolved. But it sounds better when you get the wankers at Greenpeace involved, I guess. Shipping nickel around the world and back also assumes all the nickel in all the batteries comes from the same mine, which it doesnt. But it adds to the shock value that keeps readers reading.

 

The total cost of ownership and the misleading mpg figures was the valuable part, though. I was surprised they didnt mention battery disposal as an environmental impact.

 

In either case the final point is good... "let's be green" is just selling Toyotas, it's not saving the environment.

 

 

- Greg -

[91_4x4runner]

Pretty interesting.... it's got to be legit as well, coming from a liberal state/college. Can we get some pictures of this plant?

[cygnusx1]

Yeah take everything you read with a grain of salt. Just be glad we have choices...

[Challenger]

Anyone have Al Gores email?

[strotter]

The author seems to have a grudge against hybrids - and a fairly tenuous hold on technology. He uses quite a lot of "loaded" language, the first hint of bias, so I did a little research. A Google search for the author's name "Chris Demorro" turned up 2520 hits, the majority of which had to do with this article.

 

The article is interesting as much for what it didn't say, as much as what it did. For instance, I found this as the Edmunds site:

Death — and reincarnation

So what happens when it's time to replace the battery pack in that hybrid? First off, Toyota and Honda claim that their battery packs are good for "the life of the car" and Toyota has tested its own battery for 150,000 miles with no degradation. Still, cars live pretty long lives nowadays, so what if you have to replace the battery? Or what do you do with it when the car's life is indeed over?

 

Both Honda and Toyota have a recycling program in place for those battery packs. Everything from the precious metals to the plastics and the wiring is recycled. Toyota even goes so far as to put a phone number (for recycling information) on each battery and pays dealers $200 for each battery pack.

 

Not mentioning the battery recycling programs - which is the law in most states in any event - is misleading to the point of misdirection. (As an aside, the article praises Ford for creating a very "green" factory - it sounds like an interesting place in and of itself).

 

As others have pointed out, lots of things use nickel - including the steel in all automobiles and structures, especially stainless steel. Check out the Nickel Producers Environmental Research Association. The mines are owned by two companies, Brazil's Companhia Vale do Rio Doce and Xstrate of Switzerland, not Toyota. The article seems to imply that hybrids responsible for the ecological damage in Sudbury, but the city's website tells a little bit different story - that most of the damage is decades old, and is being remediated.

 

It seems like the thing we're running out of is petrochemicals, and hybrids are designed to minimize the use of that resource. Giant vehicles use more of it than smaller ones, regardless of the "actual" mileage you get. I seriously doubt that no matter how I drive my Z, I'm not going to use as little fuel as my little Honda - which averages 36 mpg for me in mixed city/highway driving, and it has 277k miles on it. It would be a mistake to assume that all Hybrids are bad because of this article.

[buZy]

The idea here is that hybrid techonlogy is still in its primitive early stages. In another 30 years or so you can bet major performance accomplishments will have been made. It is a direction worth moving towards instead of depending on fossil fuels completely.

For now it does cost the end consumer more to run a hybrid. That reason alone I won't buy one for quite awhile, ...if ever lol. But someday don't be surprizied when your 60 year old V8 Zcar gets its doors blown off by a chinese battery powered hybrid...It's a very possible reality.

 

Brian

[MrFancypants]

It seems like the thing we're running out of is petrochemicals

 

Thats a hyped up statement too. We have hundreds of years of world oil reserves. Fort McMurray Alberta alone has over 100 years of known reserves. Once you add in the undiscovered oil, we're not running out of fossil fuels any time soon.

 

Not saying electric cars are a bad idea, but I don't really buy into the hybrid thing. Once battery technology improves to the point you can run 300 miles on a rapid charge (< 15 min), hybrids will be obsolete. The real solution is to move away from IC engines altogether.

 

Just to whet your whistle for now, check these bad boys out: http://www.teslamotors.com/index.php

 

 

 

- Greg -

[bschiltz]

lol! i gotta go slap my neighbor in the face. I have a lifted ( 22 inches) f350 and every time I jump (literally) in it, he tells me im killing mother nature. oh this is going to be sweet

 

Shoot, if you use biodiesel he deserves a kick in the sack

[strotter]

Thats a hyped up statement too. We have hundreds of years of world oil reserves. Fort McMurray Alberta alone has over 100 years of known reserves. Once you add in the undiscovered oil, we're not running out of fossil fuels any time soon.

 

Greg, I'm fairly sure there's a fair amount of oil out there, but it may not be as good as you think. Also, it may not be a "proven" as many people think it is. Check out this Wikipedia entry. The Canadians believe they have about 5 giga-barrels conventional proven reserve, and a total of about 160 giga-barrels if you count the Athabasca Oil Sands. BP, though, says it's a lot less. Check the article, and also check the differences between "proven", "probable" and "possible" reserves. The problem isn't that "there isn't enough oil", the problem is that "there isn't enough cheap oil". Not to sound political or anything:mrgreen::mrgreen:, but most of the easy-to-get-to, easy-to-process stuff is found, and as soon as a billion Chinese guys & gals, along with another billion Indian folks start driving all the cars they'll be able to afford a few years from now, from our point of view it'll look like there's no oil at all. We won't run out of oil any time soon, any more than we'll run out of, say, bison; but bison aren't the kind of resource they once were.

[cygnusx1]

A good friend of mine and I were discussing cars over the phone the other night. We are both car nuts and he is a bit more in tune with the manufacturers and laws than I am. I am more into the technical side of things. He asked me a question that I had often thought about also. His 1994 200SX got in the mid 30's for mpg. My 1990 Civic got in the high 30's to low 40's mpg. Today you would have to be hard pressed to find cars that do that.

 

I formulated that there were two reasons that mpg's are lower today than they were in the 90's.

 

1) Today's Heavier cars for safety and comfort.

2) Reduced emissions now compared to then.

 

#2 is a bit counter intuitive. In order to really get very clean burns, you need the right amount of fuel. I think, in the 90's they just ran them lean and emmisions were higher and mpg higher, as a result.

 

So, if I am correct, if slightly higher emmisions can be tolerated, higher mpg's can be had with the internal combustion, gasoline burning engine. No?

 

If most cars could get 35mpg avg, we would cut down alot on our fuel consumption without needing to force feed undeveloped technology into the market. Don't get me wrong, I am all for looking for new ways to speed around but let's not discard what we already know that works.

[Pop N Wood]

I have to agree that it is a very biased article, worded to forward his argument. He does raise a lot of valid arguments concerning the hidden costs of hybrids.

 

I have always felt hybrids are more of a gimmic than anything useful.

 

As for batteries, I have heard there is no environmentally acceptable way to dispose of a used battery.

 

Offering $200 for the old battery packs is a bit self serving because used batteries have good salvage worth. I imagine the Prius batteries are no exception, especially since they are large enough to make recycling cost effective.

 

I wouldn't expect any great advances in batteries any time soon. They have been trying for decades, but unless some break through discovery is made there will only be incremental improvements. You could allieviate a lot of the worlds problems if you could discover an enviromentally safe battery with about 50 to 100 times the capacity per pound of current batteries.

 

And yes, the known oil reserves can keep pumping at the current rate for the next 100+ years. But that is assuming the current rate will not continue to increase radically in that time. China and India are developing so rapidly. That is changing everything about the way we need to look at energy usage. They say if the average Chinese used as much energy as the average American China alone would consume something like 4 times as much energy as consumed by the entire planet.

[Sparks280zt]

www.peakoil.com

 

 

Read, learn, prepare. : )

[MrFancypants]

The problem isn't that "there isn't enough oil", the problem is that "there isn't enough cheap oil".

 

Actually after I posted I thought of going back and editing to say exactly what you pointed out, but figured I'd just do so in a later post if necessary

 

But yeah, thats really what it all boils down to. Market price determines reserves. The important point being that we will find more as we consume more. Additionally we will eventually be forced to consume less because the price forces us to.

 

This is no different than the Greenpeace saying we are destroying the world with our garbage. There is just too much speculation in their arguments and none of them are particularly well thought out.

 

Of course consumption will increase, mainly because of the industrialization of China. Metal prices are skyrocketing for similar reasons. This still ALWAYS brings us back to the same point -- consumption drives reserves. Ive never heard someone arguing that we're running out of copper or iron and that we better find an alternative to metal or the world is going to collapse!

 

It also bugs me that everyone says "Man I should get a hybrid car, it's good for the environment", when really they should try "I need to do my part and carpool to work, or ride a bike once a week". Instead we hold the corporations accountable for our own personal wastefulness. How many Prius' have you seen driving around with only one person in them?

 

 

 

- Greg -

[Pop N Wood]

Ive never heard someone arguing that we're running out of copper or iron and that we better find an alternative to metal or the world is going to collapse!

 

That is because copper is never really consumed. It can be recycled from our old products. There are also alternatives to most things requiring copper.

 

On the other hand oil takes something like a few billion years to recycle. Some day it will get so expensive we will run out. There are alternatives to oil, but right now they are simply too expensive in comparison. Gradually market forces will drive us to the cheapest form of energy. I think the only valid point the Greenpeace people have is whether we are paying the full, true cost of our oil dependency. But questions like that are probably best discussed on other sites.