On Wed, 2007-11-28 at 13:31 -0500, Martin wrote:
> I call shenanigans on your Passat TDI getting the same mileage as a 
> Prius. Maybe on the highway. Not a chance in the city. 

I don't know about the Passat TDI, but small diesel engines can easily
beat the Prius in most driving situations except perhaps truly stop and
go traffic jam environments (where walking is faster; the question of
course then is why are you even bothering to drive?). The only problem?
These diesel cars don't exist in North America. Everywhere else in the
world, but not here.

> Battery disposal 
> is a non-issue in the Prius. They get recycled.

Hehe, sorry, but if you want to consider the actual impact of a vehicle
on our planet a recycled battery most definitely is worse then no
battery (recycling can take alot of energy). And lets not forget the
huge energy and resources needed to manufacture the batteries to start
with. Then the energy and resources to build the electric motors,
relevant hardware to connect it to the rest of the car, and the
electronics.

Hybrids look superb if you only consider emissions. But when you start
calculating the extra energy and resources used to add the hybrid
feature to the car things don't look quite a rosy anymore. Remember, a
hybrid car IS a regular car, with stuff added, that stuff added doesn't
come free from an environmental point of view.

It's so common in the "greening" world of today for people to only
consider a small subset of a product's impact on the environment.
Another thing that REALLY bugs me is CFLs. YES, they do require less
energy to run, but if you add up the energy needed to manufacture them
and dispose of them properly, are they REALLY that much better then a
glass bulb and filament?

TTYL
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