To me, hybrids make intuitive sense. Why not recover some of the energy that will otherwise be converted to heat by the brakes?
But some people hate hybrids. And for them CNW’s ‘Dust to Dust Automotive Energy Report’ has been a godsend. It claims that once you consider all of the energy costs that go into a vehicle, from development through manufacture, ownership, and disposal, that hybrids cost far more than ordinary cars. Compared to the Prius, a hyper-pricey, gas-swilling Porsche Cayenne is allegedly less wasteful.
I haven’t written a critique of this study, because the findings are so obviously off-base that it didn’t seem worth the time and energy. But it keeps getting cited, most recently by an otherwise excellent blog I just stumbled across, A Car is Not a Refrigerator.
So it seems a critique is necessary after all.
Blogger Car “Dude” Alan usefully posts not only CNW’s cost per mile figures, but also the estimated life of each car. He’s actually posted the numbers from last year’s study, not this year’s, but I’ll assume that the projected lifetime hasn’t changed much. CNW states that their margin of error could be as wide as 15 percent. Wishful thinking.
The least expensive car, allegedly, is the Scion xB. It is projected to cost 0.492 dollars (love the precision to three decimal places!) over a lifetime of 189,000 miles. A little math finds a total cost of $92,988. And this is the cheapest car to own, by a good margin. Five cars from the bottom we’re already at 0.70 dollars per mile. And the lowly Chevolet Malibu, one of the least expensive “lower mid-range” cars? $1.962 per mile. Muliply by the projected lifetime of 163,000 miles, and we’ve got a lifetime cost of $319,806.
Let’s assume these cars will be driven 12,000 miles per year. Then that Malibu costs $23,544 per year. Own two similarly mid-level cars? Then apparently you’re paying about $46,000 each year to buy them and keep them going.
How can CNW issue a report with these numbers, and keep a straight face? Not just once, but now for the second straight year? These numbers aren’t just off. They’re so far off that the study was clearly based on extreme assumptions that, based on the results, should not have been made. (These assumptions discussed in a subsequent blog entry.)
Yes, they’ve calculated the amount of energy required, then converted this into dollars based on the current cost of energy. But in the capitalist system within which we live, virtually all costs end up reflected in the price to the customer. No one is heavily subsidizing General Motors’ electric bill. Or the energy bills of its suppliers. Or the energy bills of its employees. GM pays its employees and suppliers (who pay their employees), and GM’s customers pay GM.
So when I see CNW’s claim that the Toyota Prius costs $2.865 per mile, while a Porsche Cayenne costs $2.539, I’m not buying it. Few Porsche owners can afford to spend over $30,000 per year per vehicle, much less the average Prius owner. Put another way, they’re saying that it costs more to operate a Prius for a single year than Toyota charges for the car.
Just because a report says something you like to hear doesn’t mean it’s true.
One can argue as effective as Chicken or the eggs comes first.
Or someone eats all organic food and pray that they may live to 150 yrs old, in harsh reality even if u eat all the right food u get no Guarantee that u’ll live to old age. IE Jimmy Fixx he bought the farm at relative young age and he’s the proponent of exercise, keep fit.
Given N America vast acreage of land, one cannot do away with commuting 1-2 hrs per day. All these will add up. Doesn’t matter how we keep green , is going to have Smogs.
One article says when the cows feel cool another Polar bear get drowned.
Perhaps we need to go back to horse n buggy days. Work from sun up to sun down, nowadays our work days is totally screwed.
OT with all these safety navigation aids, some woman asked for my direction while on the street. They need to go another 15 km farther, do they really know how to read anything at all, the map or the TV screen where here GPS is?
Flashing rear brake lights by Mercedes will they save anybody whose had been up all night?
So are we doing all these before its time? Just like the Crosleys many years ago?
Doing the right thing will save our planet?
The cheapest is $0.50 per mile? I keep very good electronic records on my car maintenance and I can’t come close to their figures. My 1993 Escort that I drove for about 160,000 miles cost me $0.185 per mile which includes payments, gas, repairs but no insurance. My 1999 Odyssey over about 100,000 miles is at $0.357 per mile and even my 1 year old, 16,000 mile 2005 Mazda3 is only at $0.400, and that includes my $400+ monthly payment. Heck, even my toy 1960 Thunderbird is under $0.500.
I agree with you that the costs per mile cited in the CNW report seem to be overstated, but this does not mean that their ranking of the relative whole-of-life costs of building and running a hybrid are necessarily wrong. While regenerative braking and a smaller engine, sized for charging and power supplementation, do make intuitive sense, there are many offsetting disadvantages that obtain to the hybrid. There is the increased mass, for example, the mechanical complexity and the use of costly, energy-intensive materials in electric motors, cabling and batteries. The claim that hybrids will not achieve the same total mileage as conventional cars also seems plausible. Complexity will tell against a long operational life (it always does, in every mechanical system) and owners will not be inclined to stump up $5000 for a battery changeover too often. It might happen once. But twice? After sixteen years or so? I don’t think so.
The cost per mile is so tremendously overstated that it throws the entire study into question. Anyone with a shred of judgment would look at those numbers, conclude that some assumptions were far wide of the mark, and head back to the drawing board.
This doesn’t mean that hybrids are less expensive to operate. What it does mean is that you can conclude nothing based on this particular study except that saying a Hummer H3 requires less energy per mile driven than a Prius really draws in the press corps.
[...] A few weeks ago I posted a critique of CNW’s lifetime energy cost report, which controversially concluded that a Prius uses up more energy per mile over its lifetime than a Hummer. My critique then was based simply on the ridiculously high cost per mile figures the report included. From this I inferred that some untenable assumptions were made by CNW, but I didn’t read deeply enough to discover these assumptions. [...]
This study sounds like weapons-grade baloney to me. In fact, it doesn’t even pass the giggle-test.
When I was in university, I worked as a delivery driver, and my commute to/from school was ~30 km. I put at least 15,000 km (more likely 25 or 30 K) on my 1993 toyota corolla per year.
According to this study, I had to make between $45,000 and $90,000 a year as a pizza-delivery driver just to pay for my car. I don’t need to check my tax returns to know that wasn’t the case.
Also, to all the people who like to talk about how the hybrid only does a bit better than a small car:
Um, you know you can plug it in at night, right? The batteries don’t, by definition, have to be charged by the burning of fossil fuels.
Now, how your electricity is generated makes for a wide range of debate here on wether or not this is a good thing for the environment. But really, if we don’t want to go back to the stone age, it’s way past time to start building a nuclear power plant in every city with a population of 100,000 or more.
[...] Upon further research into the claims put fourth there seems to be mounting evidence that the entire premise is based on faulty numbers which the “researchers” are refusing to release. The “cost-per-mile” estimates are so grossly overstated that they throw the entire study into question. [...]
[...] There are a number of problems with this report that make the conclusion that Hummers are green and Priuses are baby- seal-clubbing smog machines hard to swallow. For one thing, it assumes that a Prius will only last 109,000 miles, which is lower than some parts of the warranty in California and similar states, while extending the life of a Hummer H1 to 379,000 miles. Plenty of Priuses have already passed 200,000 miles, often working in taxi fleets. It also mentions the use of Nickel in the batteries and the damage Nickel mining did to Sudbury, Ontario. The batteries are warrantied to 100,000 miles Nickel is recyclable. Sudbury has done a great deal to mitigate past environmental damage and is no longer a wasteland. As the TrueDelta blog points out, the cost of ownership numbers are amazingly high for all the vehicles in the report. If Priuses cost this much to build and operate, we have to assume that Toyota is taking a huge loss on every one sold, and in fact the entire auto industry is grievously undercharging us. [...]
[...] Originally Posted by hyoctane Linky: The Recorder Article: March 7, 2007 Prius Outdoes Hummer in Environmental Damage By Chris Demorro Staff Writer The Toyota Prius has become the flagship car for those in our society so environmentally conscious that they are willing to spend a premium to show the world how much they care. Unfortunately for them, their ultimate green car is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America; it takes more combined energy per Prius to produce than a Hummer. Before we delve into the seedy underworld of hybrids, you must first understand how a hybrid works. For this, we will use the most popular hybrid on the market, the Toyota Prius. The Prius is powered by not one, but two engines: a standard 76 horsepower, 1.5-liter gas engine found in most cars today and a battery- powered engine that deals out 67 horsepower and a whooping 295ft/lbs of torque, below 2000 revolutions per minute. Essentially, the Toyota Synergy Drive system, as it is so called, propels the car from a dead stop to up to 30mph. This is where the largest percent of gas is consumed. As any physics major can tell you, it takes more energy to get an object moving than to keep it moving. The battery is recharged through the braking system, as well as when the gasoline engine takes over anywhere north of 30mph. It seems like a great energy efficient and environmentally sound car, right? You would be right if you went by the old government EPA estimates, which netted the Prius an incredible 60 miles per gallon in the city and 51 miles per gallon on the highway. Unfortunately for Toyota, the government realized how unrealistic their EPA tests were, which consisted of highway speeds limited to 55mph and acceleration of only 3.3 mph per second. The new tests which affect all 2008 models give a much more realistic rating with highway speeds of 80mph and acceleration of 8mph per second. This has dropped the Priuss EPA down by 25 percent to an average of 45mpg. This now puts the Toyota within spitting distance of cars like the Chevy Aveo, which costs less then half what the Prius costs. However, if that was the only issue with the Prius, I wouldnt be writing this article. It gets much worse. Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. 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 environmentalists nightmare. The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside, said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a British-based newspaper. All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesnt end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce nickel foam. From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce? Wait, I havent even got to the best part yet. When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer – the Priuss arch nemesis. Through a study by CNW Marketing called Dust to Dust, the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles – the expected lifespan of the Hybrid. The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles. That means the Hummer will last three times longer than a Prius and use less combined energy doing it. So, if you are really an environmentalist – ditch the Prius. Instead, buy one of the most economical cars available – a Toyota Scion xB. The Scion only costs a paltry $0.48 per mile to put on the road. If you are still obsessed over gas mileage – buy a Chevy Aveo and fix that lead foot. One last fun fact for you: it takes five years to offset the premium price of a Prius. Meaning, you have to wait 60 months to save any money over a non-hybrid car because of lower gas expenses. The original article is an opinion piece (i.e., no fact-checking) for a college newspaper that publishes wild claims in a pathetic attempt to draw attention to itself. In February, The Recorder published "Rape only hurts if you fight it" and now in March, "Prius outdoes hummer." This newspaper and this article are garbage. 1. Regarding new EPA mileage estimates, Demorro claims the Chevy Aveo’s mileage puts it within "spitting distance" of the Prius. 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: Taxi driver makes career out of hybrids – Grist Magazine – MSNBC.com 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 here. 3. The Sudbury info is seriously outdated, and the comment about moon buggies (like, when did Nasa test moon buggies early 1970s) ought to have given the author a clue. Sudbury was polluted by a century of mining (1870 on). In fact, some of Sudburys 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). Blaming Toyota for the pollution at Sudbury is ludicrous. 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 Toyota factory turns landscape to arid wilderness | the Mail on Sunday ), used a stock photo you can buy online taken in 1994 to illustrate the pollution (visible here PAUL SOUDERS | WORLDFOTO ). There were, of course, no Prius in existence or being manufactured in 1994. Furthermore, Sudbury is no longer this 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 — that’s GM, maker of the Hummer, ahem, writing about how Sudbury was polluted and how it has come back. Really, one should blame Chicago more than Toyota, as Sudbury’s trees were all cut down in 1871 to help rebuild Chicago after the fire. GM provides telling photos of some of the reclamation from 1979 to present. Canadian news recently broadcast a show on Sudbury’s regreening (the acid rain problem David Martin of Greenpeace is talking about is the situation pre 1972): The author of this article, Demorro, is so fact-challenged that in his follow-up piece he recommends people buy a Tesla Roadster for $30,000. The Tesla Roadster actually costs $92,000. [...]
To all that think the prices are over-stated and calculated your own figures.
The figures that you posted on your personal cars are interesting. But, I’m assuming you calculated the cost of the car, gas, basic maintenance and repairs. HOWEVER, if you read the study closely you will find that the cost per mile IS NOT the cost to the consumer. It is an energy cost converted to a dollar amount.
So, I would ask all of you that calculatd cost figures to go back, start over, and include ENERGY cost figures for mining and refining raw material, shipping and manufaturing costs, assembly, and last but not least add the figures you calculated (the cost of the car, gas, basic maintenance and repairs), but with added calculation for pumping, refining and transporting every gallon of gas, quart of oil and/or repairs. Oh hell, include the calories (plus the cost of food production) that the salesman used to pitch the sales line, too.
Think about it. Cars are expesive.
Think about it–who is paying all of these costs you mention, if not the consumer?
No one. All such costs are necessarily reflected in the purchase price of the car, fuel, and maintenance, which are paid by the consumer.
Raw material costs, the cost to feed the salesman, and so forth all end up in the price of the car. The cost to transport gas ends up in the price of gas. Welcome to Capitalism 101.
First off, remeber, this is an ENERGY cost converted to dollar amount.
Secondly, there are many reasons the cost wouldn’t be immidiatly evident to the consumer. For example; why do you think petrolium is so cheap in the U.S. compared to almost all other countries in the world. Government subsidy. With out all our tax dollars at work the cost of gas at the pump would be more in the range of 8-15 dollars a gallon. Next remember that still over 50% of the power in the U.S. is directly from fossil fuels. Even the food is fertilized by petrochemical fertilizers (oil derived)… All these Government subsidiezed. So where does all this money come from? Well, tax dollars (so, yes, partly the consumer and “Capitalism 101″), but also the U.S. isn’t exactly paid up on our debts either…
Anyway, with all this in mind, we are terribly spoiled. We don’t pay the “real” price for anything if you think about it. Energy comes at a cost. A big one. We have all been spoiled by cheap, abundant energy in the form of petroleum for a while now. When it runs out (I do realize this is debatable when, but we all know we will eventually) we will be back to paying “real price” for things.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the figures in this report might actually be conservative…
Sorry, looking at my last post I’m still not being very clear.
Remeber back to science class. There is a law of conservation of energy. What the law states that all the NET energy in the entire universe = 0. So if you look at the earth as an individual body (that is, without the sun) all net energy = 0 and nothing happens (minus tapping into geothermal or gravitational magnetics or tidal if you want to include the moon in the “earth body”). With the sun we have a surplus of energy on earth. Plants utilize this energy to make sugars. Omnivores and carnivores (that eat onmivores) both really only exist because some plants convert this excess energy into sugars. So, only with the light and heat energy from the sun are we able to do anything. And by the same token we are limited to the amount of energy we use to as much as we receive from the sun.
I’ll compare this to economics. Oil acts like a bank. All it is, is an energy storage system that utilized and stored sun energy at one time. But, once our “bank account” get to “zero” we are back to using our limited, day to day, good ‘ol sun shine (geothermal, tidal or gravitaional if we get inventive enough by then). We would have then depleted our “savings”.
So what is the cost of a car?! A dollar amount to the consumer?! How can the cost be calculated when the consumer pays using a “savings account” that he never saved?? Thus, we have the ENERGY cost in a dollar amount.
So I see yet another few people didn’t even open up the official 400 page PDF report they made about this research. I managed to read about 30 some pages in, and this report is way beyond your guys’ comprehension.
To start, you guys have already completely misunderstood this whole thing right from the get go! How? The cost per mile statistic. This report is 400 pages long for a reason guys, i thought i understood the information just by looking at the list, but it’s not that simple. “It is important to note that the original owner of the vehicle doesn’t pay this amount,” states the official document. First off, this isn’t what the person pays. If we all paid the amount of money that we damage the earth with, then we wouldn’t be able to buy all the cheap goods from china, or even buy local meat! No, this price per mile is based on the amount of energy, in BTU’s converted to gasoline at the price of $3.00 a gallon, is taken from the earth itself.
Here’s a quote from the official document: “Over the course of 2003, the White Board became crowded with every conceivable energy-required action necessary to conceive, produce, drive, and dispose of a vehicle. In all, nearly 4,000 data points were considered pertinent.”
Four thousand factors in this equation people! This goes far beyond just how much it takes to make the car. Based on what i’ve read, some factors of this equation include the factory workers commute to work, just how much waste goes into each assembly plant, the pollution shipping it to the states, oh i forgot to mention the pollution and materials used for even designing the car in step one.
There was even an explanation involving the selection of the Scion Xb as the greenest car, and believe it or not it has nothing to do with the amount of miles it lasts or how many miles per gallon it has.
Here let me just quote the original document again, which i firmly believe people should at least skim through before raging against the years of hard research:
“Because of its generally overall attractiveness to an older consumer group and the concentration
of xBs in relatively fair weather climates, there is (as history and CNW data has shown) less
likelihood of accidents and repairs yet because of its high acquisition by younger consumers
there are lower incidents of regular energy-consuming maintenance (oil, tires, batteries, etc.).
In both the older and younger audiences, repair of minor damage to sheet metal is more
often ignored thus similarly reducing the energy requirements on a Dust to Dust basis.
It should also be pointed out that on a Dust to Dust basis, the Estimated Miles doesnít mean the
vehicle is ìused upî and has no life remaining, only that this is the approximate mileage at the
time it is removed from the streets as a daily-use vehicle and sent for disposal as either a source
of parts or eventually scrapped.”
Read it and weep people, this information isn’t as user friendly as it seemed. half of this seems to be based on who buys the car and what their life is like. I have yet to completely understand the research they did.
Also, from a life of personal experience, it makes complete sense to me that the hummer h3 is better, or damned close, to the prius in terms of the environment for a few reasons. First off in the design process, the prius has a collection of pruis specific parts. The H3, is actually a chevy colorado, or a gmc canyon, or the isuzu equivalent, in disguise. The prius is a single car where as the H3 is multiple. This doesnt even count all the brakes, engines, and other mechanical components which are used in many other vehicles. What GM did was spent alot of time and production on parts, but in the end they end up with multiple vehicles, and even more interchangeable parts, and toyota ended up with one car, and there’s no doubt that at least some of the prius’ parts are interchangeable but not nearly as much as the H3. This doesnt even account for the length of time before the consumer scraps it. Based on CMR’s studies, it seems that by 109k people either get rid of or scrap the prius. I can understand people selling the car or not driving it because of the battery price. The h3 on the other hand will be kept until well over 200k miles. Not necessarily because it is more reliable, but because it’s function as a passenger vehicle surpasses that of the Pruis and it’s varieties are very useful and well designed trucks. Admit it, for an econobox, there’s alot of people who look for another car after 109k miles, especially when the battery is giving out and your mileage has constantly decreased due to battery decay.
Don’t get me wrong though, i believe the hybrid should still be purchased. There’s a ton of new jobs being formed around battery production, and everyone, recently Toyota, is investing on the success of battery powered vehicles. At this rate, lithium will be the new oil and with batteries being 100 percent recyclable there’s alot of potential for the battery future. Heck, we already know of a HUGE deposit in Bolivia.
If some of their assumptions are clearly flawed, then reading 400 pages isn’t going to change this.
The average life of a Prius is clearly far beyond 109,000 miles, for one thing.
Another, not pointed out in my critique here, is that they divided R&D and factory construction costs by the number of cars produced to date, without making any assumption about how many more cars would be produced by this investment. So relatively young models and technology were severely penalized.