Overcoming Prius' Green Edge
by Jeremy Elton Jacquot, Los Angeles on 10. 1.07
In the minds of many, Toyota's Prius has long been considered synonymous with hybrid cars. Praised as being ahead of its time and the darling of Hollywood and Silicon Valley types, the Prius quickly gained iconic status amongst the green set when it was first unveiled a few years back. Its long reign at the top, however, may soon be coming to an end: a new ranking of environmentally friendly vehicles from researchers at Cardiff University and consultancy Clifford Thames has determined that cleaner versions of conventional cars are fast catching up and may soon be poised to overtake it.
A few smaller cars in their ranking - including Fiat's Panda, BMW's Mini Cooper Diesel hatchback and Toyota's own Yaris - already outperform the Prius on emissions and on their overall "footprint". In an attempt to craft a ranking that would better encompass vehicles' overall environmental impact, the researchers gave carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and other emissions a 50% weighing and the vehicles' construction, energy and end-of-life costs another 50%. "There's a big focus on exhaust emissions, but they're only part of the story," said David Riemenschneider, Clifford Thames's chief executive.
Though many of the vehicles they included in the ranking belonged to a smaller size class than the Prius - a crucial aspect they acknowledge makes for an unequal comparison - other low-emission models they evaluated, which include forthcoming cleaner diesel and petrol cars, were judged to be greener in a side-by-side comparison. ""We're not saying that any car that is the same size as the Prius is better, but the gap is closing very rapidly, and conventional technologies will pass the Prius," said another Clifford Thames researcher.
Examples of tweaks to conventional technologies that will help narrow the gap include tires with reduced rolling resistance, "stop-start" devices that turn off cars' ignitions when they stop and much improved diesel particulate filters. Some industry analysts have criticized hybrid technology as an interim solution and one that only works for drivers who cover short distances. Many are confident a new wave of innovations prompted by growing consumer concern over carbon footprints and emissions will help boost the fortunes of conventional vehicles.
Given the unprecedented level of success attained by the Prius, it remains to be seen whether consumers will be willing to dump hybrids in short shrift and, more importantly, whether Toyota will just let its rivals beat it at its own game.
Via ::Financial Times: Closing the gap in the race to be green (newspaper), ::Financial Times: Prius loses ground to other cars (newspaper)
See also: ::Toyota Unveils Plug-in Prius, ::Prius Envy? Honda to Battle Toyota on Green Performance, and Looks, ::Now More Than a Million Toyota Hybrids
Image courtesy of vernieman via flickr
Unprecedented level of success? Toyota sold only 5000 of them in the UK last year. In the same time MINI sold 200,000.
Sorry, but the Prius is a joke here in Europe. It's no more economical than it's contemporaries and as pointed out above, it's less environmentally friendly too. It sells to the over 60s who seem to like it's bland styling or something.
Why does Treehugger keep touting the Prius as some kind of green solution when it's clearly not?
"Examples of tweaks to conventional technologies that will help narrow the gap include tires with reduced rolling resistance, "stop-start" devices that turn off cars' ignitions when they stop and much improved diesel particulate filters."
LRR tires have been around for ages and now they're "new"? These and other simple enhancements that improve efficiency have been suppressed for years by the big auto companies in favor of profit. To give them praise now is ludicrous.
Hang on Shaun. In urban situations the Prius has a clear emissions advantage over conventional comptetitors of a similar size. On the open road it's less clear cut but it's still an efficient petrol vehicle.
Sales of hybrids have been slow in the UK for two reasons - lack of favourable tax incentives and the availability of decent diesel alternatives that have only slightly higher emissions than the Prius but cost a lot less.
Actually there's a third reason and that's the cost of a Prius in the UK compared to the US. Prices start at £17,777 in the UK ($36,000) but start at $20,950 in the US. Ahhhh good ol' rip off Britain!
In my view hybrids won't deliver significant savings until they swap the electric motor and combustion engine around and at long last series hybrids are poised to enter the market.
SHAUN - the Mini is not a PZEV, but probably for as low as £300 it could be - the technology exists.
It would make your Mini - just as green - as a Prius.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PZEV
Check out the linked articles.
The car manufacturers actually lobby the governments NOT to make PZEV exhaust systems MANDATORY.
If it became mandatory, the After Market would have a mess on it's hands, stuck with old - polluting - exhaust systems in stock. One reason, among many.
I for one own a Prius, and here in Quebec, Canada, the price difference between a Mini and a Prius is minimal.
So it comes down to a choice in one's life - I can only afford X amount of money, which car do I get?
I for one am glad you got a Mini instead of an SUV. Just imagine, some SUV's are equal in price to a Mini.
What does that say about quality?
Congrats, Shaun:
You're showing the world that not every myopic individual lives in the United States. I'm getting so tired of people confabulating the situation in Europe and the situation in the US on the question of hybrids vs. diesels. I have posted so many time about this, I don't know what good it does.
1) I have a hybrid civic MANUAL transmission (2004). I averaged about 48.8 mpg over the 28,000 miles it has been driven. It is more efficient than any diesel car available in the UNITED STATES. Period. The US versions of the Jetta/Gulf/Bettle TDIs approach 48 on the highway, but not in combined drving. And I live in Los Angeles, where even if you're on the highway, you're not getting "highway" mileage. Moreover, because I live in CALIFORNIA, and buying a new diesel car is not an option for me AT ALL. They don't sell new diesels in California because of emissions concerns. Maybe in a couple years it will be now that we have low sulfur diesel in the US, but MINI, for example, has not intention of importing the diesel into the US. So you're comparing a car I can't buy to a car that I can, and saying the car I can buy isn't green.
2) What people should be getting really excited about are hybrid diesel cars. Driven on biodiesel. That should be exciting. Hybrids and diesels are not mutually exclusive. Imagine a hybrid, diesel, rotary engine. Imagine that there doesn't need to be a debate! Hybrids, by storing power via regenerative braking MAKE SENSE. Start stop technology makes sense. Clean diesel technology makes sense. Using biodiesel makes sense. These are all ideas that can be true at the same time. Making it an either/or conversation is stupid.
3) Thus, taken together, this "debate" is IDIOTIC. When gasoline gets refined, some gas and some diesel fuel is made. You can change refinery conditions to change the ratio of gasoline to diesel, but you can't change the fact that you can't take a barrel of crude and get all gasoline, or all diesel. We live in a world where until we've got electric cars charging from the PVs on our roofs, we're going to have engines that take gas and engines that take diesel.
Here in the US, we have lots of heavy trucks shipping products all over a country the size of the EU. It's not an option for the US to abolish all conventional petrol cars. Sorry, it's just reality.
Shaun, et all. Yes the Prius is over hyped and it's a transitional car. A more wholistic view of this car would factor in the mining the ore used to makes the batteries, recycling of the batteries, the total carbon footprint of the car, and the harmful EMF's produced by it's electric engine. Biodiesel is a transitional fuel and I use it sparingly in my VW the averages 49.2 mpg. Better to walk and use human powered vehicles.
I'm sorry Randy, but what is it you see as "harmful EMFs"? Electromagnetic fields are not harmful, unless your a floppy disk, and the Prius doesn't produce a level of EMF greater than that of a mobile phone.
As for the rest of it, the Prius is now a number of years old, many conventional models have been revamped in that time, giving them a bit of a boost. However, I have yet to read much about conventional cars approaching the "around town" mileage of the Prius, so I don't think you can count it out yet. I am looking to see where Toyota takes it next, but I'm also interested in seeing what the future brings in other cars. Of course, I'm much more interested in the new crops of electric bicycles!
I was only using the MINI as an example of a car that has far outsold the Prius in the UK to show that it really isn't an 'unprecedented success'. I don't own a car. I use a bicycle or walk most of the time.
No car is green but there are still many cars greener than a Prius.
FYI the MkII BMW MINI, which I don't think you have in the USA yet, has regenerative braking and start/stop and an emissions figure that matches the Prius without all the issues with the car's manufacture that Toyota have. It gets 72 mpg (imperial gallon). It's also bigger than the previous Mk1 model. Prius is 65.7 mpg.
Audi's A2 TDI also pretty much beat the Prius on every level too back in 2000 by being lighter. The Prius is a HEAVY car.
Treehugger's take on 'green' cars is too US-centric as this UK report shows. There are 11 cars listed that are greener. There's at least a couple missing ahead of the Prius including Toyota's Aygo (the C1 / 107 are there and are essentially the same car as the Aygo).
Of course, I expected the 'for it's size' counter argument but really, how big do you need your car to be? Perhaps Toyota could look at lowering both the weight and size of the Prius? If you really need a car then buying smaller cars that cost half as much as a Prius might actually be better for us all. Plant $10,000 worth of trees with your change from a Prius.
I wonder if the Venture One or the Aptera will lead the list next year. They will be hard for a conventional car to beat. Is it fair to compare motorcycles to a car?
Shaun said: "Of course, I expected the 'for it's size' counter argument but really, how big do you need your car to be?"
Exactly. You can't compare Prius vs Mini.
If Prius is made as small as Mini, it will beat the latter out. And mind you, Prius is not a big car, just Mini is a "mini" car.
A few smaller cars in their ranking - including Fiat's Panda, BMW's Mini Cooper Diesel hatchback and Toyota's own Yaris - already outperform the Prius on emissions and on their overall "footprint".
Seems like a variant of that silly CNW "study" which concluded that Hummers are cleaner than Priuses. Not going to get headlines telling the world the Prius is the greenest, but you'll sure get them if you say it isn't.
To show how silly this is, the diesel MINI with an automatic puts out 136 g/km of CO2 and 0.143 g/km of NOx. By comparison, a Prius puts out 104 g/km of CO2 and 0.010 g/km of NOx. These are substantial, not minor, differences in emissions. Meanwhile, the current generation of the Prius is going to be upgraded soon, and it's only going to get more efficient and cleaner - a moving target.
FYI, the Fiat Panda puts out 5 times the NOx and 23 more grams per km of CO2 than the Prius. A diesel Yaris puts out 17 times the NOx and 15 more grams of CO2 per km than the Prius.
Like the article said, keep in mind that all these vehicles are substantially smaller than the Prius, and one can only imagine the dismal performance of the thriftiest versions of those small vehicles.
The only way these "studies" ever get the data to fit is by making up numbers about manufacture and "end of life" that seriously overstate the impact of the Prius, as well as by overweighting those things, seeing as in reality they generally account for only 10-20% of lifetime environmental impact of a vehicle in most legitimate LCA studies.
mining the ore used to makes the batteries, recycling of the batteries, the total carbon footprint of the car, and the harmful EMF's produced by it's electric engine
Randy, you forgot to mention that it mows down blind people, electrocutes emergency workers, the batteries die off and cost $10,000 to replace, it only gets 23 mpg, never pays for itself, is really just a complicated Corolla at 3 times the price, and is fugly. I've also heard that it makes your peepee shrink and spontaneously combusts sometimes.
Thanks for warning us.