Commentary
Hidden cost of driving a Prius
Totaling all the energy expended, from design to junkyard, a Hummer may be a
better bargain. By James L. Martin
When it comes to protecting the environment, senior citizens should
concentrate more on the total energy consumed in building and operating a
car than its fuel efficiency - no matter how impressive the statistics
appear on the window sticker at the showroom.
A prime example is Toyota's Prius, a compact hybrid that's beloved by ardent
environmentalists and that fetches premium prices because it gets nearly 50
miles-per-gallon in combined highway/city driving. Yet, new data have
emerged that show the Prius may not be quite as eco-friendly as first
assumed - if you pencil in the environmental negatives of producing it in
the first place.
Like most hybrids, the Prius relies on two engines - one, a conventional
76-horsepower gasoline power plant, and a second, battery-powered, that
kicks in 67 more horses. Most of the gas is consumed as the car goes from 0
to 30, according to alarmed Canadian environmentalists, who say Toyota's
touting of the car's green appeal leaves out a few
pertinent and disturbing facts.
The nickel for the battery, for instance, is mined in Sudbury, Ontario, and
smelted at nearby Nickel Centre, just north of the province's massive
Georgian Bay. Toyota buys about 1,000 tons of nickel from the facility each
year, ships the nickel to Wales for refining, then to China, where it's
manufactured into nickel foam, and then onto Toyota's battery plant in
Japan.
That alone creates a globe-trotting trail of carbon emissions that ought to
seriously concern everyone involved in the fight against global warming. All
told, the start-to-finish journey travels more than 10,000 miles - mostly by
container ship, but also by diesel locomotive.
But it's not just the clouds of greenhouse gases generated by all that
smelting, refining, manufacturing and transporting that worries green
activists. The 1,250-foot-tall smokestack that spews huge puffs of sulphur
dioxide at the Sudbury mine and smelter operation has left a large swath of
the surrounding area looking like a surrealistic scene from the depths of
hell.
On the perimeter of the area, skeletons of trees and bushes stand like
ghostly sentinels guarding a sprawling wasteland. Astronauts in training for
NASA actually have practiced driving moon buggies on the suburban Sudbury
tract because it's considered a duplicate of the Moon's landscape. "The acid
rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants, and the soil
slid down off the hillside," David Martin, Greenpeace's energy coordinator
in Canada, told the London Daily Mail.
"The solution they came up with was the Superstack. The idea was to dilute
pollution, but all it did was spread the fallout across northern Ontario,"
Martin told the British newspaper, adding that Sudbury remains "a major
environmental and health problem. The environmental cost of producing that
car battery is pretty high."
A "Dust to Dust" study by CNW Marketing Research of Bandon, Ore., shows the
overall eco-costs of automotive hybrids may be even higher. Released last
December, the study tabulated all data on the energy necessary to plan,
build, sell, drive and dispose of a vehicle from drawing board to junkyard,
including such items as plant-to-dealer fuel costs, distances driven,
electricity usage per pound of material in each vehicle, and hundreds of
other variables. To put the data into understandable terms for consumers,
CNW translated it into a "dollars per lifetime mile" figure, or the energy
cost per mile driven. When looked at from that perspective, the Prius and
other hybrids quickly morphed from fuel-sippers into energy-guzzlers.
The Prius registered an energy-cost average of $3.25 per mile driven over
its expected life span of 100,000 miles. Ironically, a Hummer, the brooding
giant that has become the bête noir of the green movement, did much better,
with an energy-cost average of $1.95 over its expected life span of 300,000
miles. And its crash protection makes it far safer than the tiny Prius. Such
information should be of major concern to senior citizens - especially those
on a fixed budget. If seniors need a small gas-sipping car for city travel,
however, the undisputed champion is Toyota's own gasoline-powered
subcompact, the Scion xB, whose energy cost averaged a negligible 48 cents
for each mile traveled over its lifetime.
Fully armed with all the facts, seniors may want to zip down to their
nearest Toyota dealer and trade in their Priuses for Scion xBs. That would
be the equivalent of reducing their energy footprint from a size 24D to
about a size 5A. In the case of global warming, one small step for man may
turn out to be a giant leap for mankind.
James L. Martin (JMartin@60plus.org) is president of the 60 Plus
Association, a national nonpartisan
senior citizen organization based in Arlington, Va.
http://cnwmr.com/nss-folder/automotiveenergy/
