Why Top Gear got it ALL WRONG in 'Prius vs. BMW M3'

I find this article much more funny than this TopGear episode. Did you really have to write this article in order to explain why this comic comparison is inaccurate. You obviously don't watch TopGear on a regular basis. If you did, you would know that Jeremy Clarkson will say anything in order to prove himself correct. Of course they know that the Prius is more economical to drive in a real world environment.

In the future, please spare us the embarrassment and only post relevant news about transportation and cars. Don't forget that in Europe, the Prius ranks 45th on the list of most fuel efficient cars.

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MGR: I'm very aware that they know. It's the viewers I'm more concerned about, including those who are not familiar with the show and will watch the segment on Youtube, as I did (it was featured on reddit.com recently).

Good post! I'm so sick of all these "hummer vs. prius", "kayak vs. prius", "tonka truck vs. prius".. They always find a way to bash the Prius. What matters is real world.

you should mention that the oil also has to be ported around the planet....by the thousands of gallons...
and that modern cars in general have parts and materials sourced from around the planet...

regards

even with the bmw not going top speed it should be burning more fuel than the stupid little prius. Prius should be making a more efficient gas burning portion to their car

and i think you missed the part where he clearly says that he doesn't think everyone should go buy a m3! the point is that its mainly in how you drive your nonhybrid car.

yeah, this is a pretty lame article... especially since Jeremy finished the segment with, "it's not what you drive, but how you drive it"...

if the Prius is so great, how come an unmodified 9 year old Honda Insight can regularly hypermile above 125mpg?

and what Jeremy was saying about the nickel mine in Ontario is true...it's an environmental disaster and nothing grows for miles around the mine pit.

Prius' suck. the only reason people drive them is because, "they look like a hybrid"... if it looked like any other car and got great mileage, people wouldnt drive it. bunch of image conscious pansies.

In my opinion, the most important part of the video was the end of the clip when they say not to change your car, but to change your driving style? It's true. If you trade in your 2005 Land Rover for a 2008 Prius, your might be causing more harm then good. Rampant consumerism is responsible for a huge impact on the environment. Trading in cars willy nilly when the next big eco-box enters the market is a bad habit.

If you can't afford to buy a new car, or you've just recently bought a new car... just drive more efficiently. If everyone took that advice, we'd save more fuel than all of the prius's on the market currently have alone.

A nice comparison as the above poster mentioned would be the amount of oil spent carting oil over the ocean that they BMW had to spend in order to simply catch up to the Prius' mileage.

I think that the commentary on the video is missing a key point, the way we drive matters! Our consumerism affects the environment, and buying a new car simply because of the fuel economy may not make a lot of environmental sense. The way we drive significantly affects our fuel economy. I have been driving a used Honda insight and the real time feedback on mileage has significantly changed the way I drive the non-hybrid vehicles we have in our family. Through changing the way our family drives we have improved the fuel economy in our other vehicles.

Ironically, I had to perform my own sort of test driving about 800 miles to move. The Prius got there in one and a half fillups whereas the Scion XB (original) got there in about 3 and I have a bigger gas tank. I can't imagine how badly a BMW would fare (if driven at the speed limit like we did).

I also think they made a good point in the segment, that it is about HOW you drive, just as much as it is about what you drive. Isn't that fair? So the prius was being driven at 8/8ths, the m3 was likely only being 1/8ths. I don't think they were saying AT ALL that driving the prius at 1/8ths is less efficient than driving the m3 at 1/8ths.

Besides, I don't think you need to be worried about the health of the prius. With used examples selling for over 30K and buyers queued for months waiting for new ones, I wouldn't be too concerned about people bashing it.

The Top Gear demonstration was designed to show that how you drive a car makes just as much difference as what car you drive, It was done in an extreme fashion to get attention. If they were just trying to make the Prius look bad they wouldn't have used a big engined BMw M3 but something more fuel efficient.

If you drive everywhere with your foot to the floor you get bad gas mileage. Driving a hybrid does not automatically mean great mileage. If I had a penny for every time I had someone complain to me about the fuel consumption of their car only to watch them accelerate hard, speed and so on I'd be a millionaire...

If the Top Gear demo makes people change how they drive instead of blindly buying a new car based on marketing hype or hearsay, then so much the better.

He's also drafting the Prius while driving the M3.

I could follow around a Honda Fit at 100 mph in a Hummer and probably get better mpg's.

Yes, it's a bit tongue-in-cheek and he does get credit for mentioning that it's not what you drive as much as how you drive... BUT, I can guarantee that more than one person will quote this test to back up their argument for the M3.

Thanks for calling out Top Gear...

I'm actually just waiting for them to do a segment on the Tesla Roadster. And as much as i love the environment, i'd have to agree with them, the Prius is a green-washed joke of a car.

I wouldn't expect anyone to actually compare these two vehicles but Top Gear is for entertainment purposes, thus I feel they created a viral and very successful episode. That was their mission and they succeeded.

Now on to the Prius snobs and other hippies... you cut in front of others when your HOV lane ends, you smile as if nothing you do is wrong, you don't maintain your car and it is always dirty. Please do the car culture a favor and get trade your Prius for a bike.

Smart car owners are the new green crowd.

Though I agree with you that the test is flawed the guys at Top Gear make a VERY true point. It is not so much about the car as much as it is about your driving style. If you buy like a Prius and drive like a maniac you're gonna get 17 MPG is you drive it in the sweet spot you'll get those 50 MPG. If you hyper mile you'll get 120 MPG. Does that mean everyone should hyper mile. No. What it means is if you keep an eye on your RPM level and try to drive without over reving your engine you'll get better mileage out of it. Not everyone is going to go out and buy a Prius so until you can afford to get and high efficiency gas vehicle or like me till a fully electric solution that doesn't use batteries that will become and disposal issue later. You do that best with what you have.

Top Gear is good entertainment, but if you've followed Jeremy Clarkson's career starting as a humble magazine writer many years ago you'll know he loves attention.

There seems to be a wave of prius hatred across europe at the moment, usually focused on their love of diesels as a better solution than hybrids. However they seem completely oblivious to the horrible pollution toll mass use of diesel cars has caused.

I live in california where the air is (generally) clear and clean, when I go to a major city in europe I can't stand the horrible pollution they have caused by diesel exhausts, I couldn't imagine having asthma and living there.

My civic hybrid gets over 50mpg (US gallons) which is 60mpg on an imperial gallon, it also emits little more than carbon dioxide and water, europe can keep its stinky polluting diesels and I'll keep my hybrid thank you very much!

"yeah, this is a pretty lame article... especially since Jeremy finished the segment with, "it's not what you drive, but how you drive it"..."

How you drive is just one part of the equation.

think of it this way:

1 guy who drives really efficiently will get good mileage in both the Prius and the M3, but he'll get much better mileage in the Prius.

1 other guy who drives badly will get bad mileage in the Prius and M3, but still much better mileage in the Prius.

So it's definitely not just how you drive.

"BUT, I can guarantee that more than one person will quote this test to back up their argument for the M3."

Yeah, that's the important thing here. I've seen it happen so often...

I'm sure the top gear guys know very well this stuff, but when they do shows that are very easy to misunderstand, or that are ambiguous, they just reinforce bad beliefs that many people have.

You're actually agreeing with the segment. Their whole point is that your personal driving style matters much more than what kind of car you drive. I think they successfully proved that. I know people who regularly drive over 100 miles per hour. I'm not one of them, but driving a Prius would probably not be a good idea for them.

I know the trehugger ppl know that how you drive is a big thing, after all they have lots of tps about it and hypermiling and stuff like that.

maybe top gear viewers don't know that, but that is certainly a very bad way to try to get that message out to them. that's not what one remembers after seeing that video

>and i think you missed the part where he clearly says that he doesn't think everyone should go buy a m3! the point is that its mainly in how you drive your nonhybrid car.

Well, duh. But driven the same way, you still get better mileage in a hybrid.

You bet it's how you drive that matters...but why buy a BMW if you are going to drive it like a Prius?!

Got to agree with Wes, obviously a short news day on an otherwise great site. The clip even starts with them more or less stating it was tongue in cheek, and if the entire show had been watched and not selectively edited clips the humour would be far more apparent. Most Top Gear fans know this as they know the show and tend to know about cars!
For the people you fear will take it seriously, I feel the same concern with many hypermiling articles that discuss unsafe driving practices like drafting, driving in neutral, over inflating tyres, etc.
All cars have different impacts, none are perfect. A calm driver in an M3 will be more fuel efficient than a nut in a Prius, but a calm driver in a Prius will be more fuel efficient than both. Attacking Top Gear is a pointless exercise, and if your readers don't like the show or the sense of humour it uses they'll find their television has a button to change the channel, and an environmentally friendly knob that turns off the power!

JB you do know that a lot of techniques that hypermilers use is straight up illegal and dangerous right ?Like turning off your car in the middle of a highway or following so close to a tractor trailer that if the truck even taps its brakes your crushed?

Also hypermilers can get huge numbers in a prius also.

Great post. If Top Gear wanted to say something, they should have said it more clearly, because the take home message really seemed to be "the Prius sucks".

Anyone familiar with Top Gear could probably assume that any "green" test would be biased. I am an avid fan of Top Gear and I can tell you that most of their “tests” are subjective and hilarious.
Having said that, I will point out that the comment made by Jeremy that “it isn’t what you drive so much as how you drive it” does have a ring of truth to it. I once heard that Americans could say up to 10% of the annual gasoline consumed nationally if they would bother to keep their gas pedal off of the floor. I haven’t verified this, but treehugger’s recent article “Honda Insight Hybrid Wins Hypermiling Competition” has stated that the high mileage was achieved by accelerating gently among other things.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/06/hypermiling-honda-insight-hybrid-car-jack-martin.php
Perhaps if everyone watched Top Gear instead of trying to drive like Top Gear, we’d be a slightly better off environmentally.

I agree with the article that the show would've been good entertainment if they had at least explained a bit what they were trying to do instead of playing it so straight. Maybe it's a British thing that doesn't translate well across the Atlantic?

In any case, it did seem like a Prius-bashing piece that, when you look at it very closely, had enough literal truth in it so that they can say "oh no, we actually just meant this!". Meh.

first off "But making a car is just the start. Depending on which life cycle analysis you look at, the fuel makes up to 80%+ of the footprint of a motor vehicle.".... are you sure about that. It takes a lot of energy to manufacture a car.

Second. the Prius are not that environmentally friendly, they just use less petrol. The batteries used in the Prius create vast amounts of toxic waste. And the Hybrid Prius actually has worse emissions than a non-hybrid Prius due to the fact that a catalytic converter only works when the car is warm (hence you always get your emissions performed on your vehicle when the engine is warm)

I am tired of all the smug Prius owners out there. You are not saving the environment. You are just spending less on gasoline.

rocksauce, please cite your sources or stop spreading myths and FUD.

Well - I am a treehugger who also happens to love Top Gear. I drive a civic hybrid moderately and get 45 mpg (average.. i know).

But as a Top Gear fan, I know to take everything they do with a grain of salt. If you watch enough top gear, you know Clarkson always does outrageous things and go for the wow factor. Just take the episode they did in the US for example.

I think people who would take shows at face value are the same people who are looking for an excuse to continue driving non fuel efficient cars anyway.

Glad Treehugger posted an explanation.. but sadly I think this might only be preaching to the choir :(

Well - I am a treehugger who also happens to love Top Gear. I drive a civic hybrid moderately and get 45 mpg (average.. i know).

But as a Top Gear fan, I know to take everything they do with a grain of salt. If you watch enough top gear, you know Clarkson always does outrageous things and go for the wow factor. Just take the episode they did in the US for example.

I think people who would take shows at face value are the same people who are looking for an excuse to continue driving non fuel efficient cars anyway.

Glad Treehugger posted an explanation.. but sadly I think this might only be preaching to the choir :(

Indeed it's a laughable comparison, as the BMW was drafting (more or less), and in its power band, whereas the Prius was at or near it's top speed. Everyone always seems to forget that a Prius is designed to be recycled, and that a test track is not a fair comparison. How about Prius versus BMW going across London at rush hour. Tell me how the Beemer could possibly win that one!

Last word though, he was right about how for most people, it's more about how you drive than what you drive. If you drive your car with a little more care, you can up your mileage significantly without having to purchase anything new...

It is obvious from the article and many of the responses that most of them are not Brits who are Top Gear fans.
The in jokes abounded and the segment was totally in keeping with the theme of the show, which is and has always been the European (with of course a heavy British focus) car culture.

Watch an entire series of Top Gear and you will realise it is THE most respected car show/magazine etc in the world. Very few people get to borrow the kind of one of a kind test vehicles that they do and do the kind of things they do. They have comedy segments (I personally loved Car Darts), challenges (Drive across the spine of Africa in a car bought there for 1500 pounds or less) and good honest road testing of super cars which make normal people drool.

This is not a show about reasonably priced family cars.... unless it's taking them and turning them into boats

I am a regular reader of TH but articles like this make TH look like a bunch of people with no sense of humor! I love Top Gear ... it is a great show and the presenters have a great sense of humor. The Prius segment was clearly done to show people that it is how you drive and not what you drive that makes a difference ... maybe the British sense of humor is too sophisticated for you. Over the last couple of seasons, Top Gear has performed several driving specials about how to get the most out of a car (including one where Jeremy Clarkson drove a new fuel-effiecient car from London to Scotland and back on a single tank of fuel).

Think about how it would look if someone took some of the TH articles out of context!

When I first saw this, I was a bit surprised by their apparent conclusion, but the final statement really sums up the point of the segment. I regularly see Prius drivers in the Bay Area driving 80+ MPH on my commute. This might help explain to them why that is defeating the purpose of owning a Prius.

Funny you don't see any vehicle vs. insight.

8+ years and still most efficient : )

I think this article has probably been written by someone who's not a regular TOP GEAR follower, but that kinds of proves the point the article is trying to make: People not familiar with the show might see it as just some Prius bashing with a tiny bit of wisdom on top ("it's how you drive").

Maybe fans of the show got it, but it's a bit condescending for them to assume that everybody should be familiar with their show.

The headline is a bit sensationalistic (well, 10,000x less than anything on Drudge or HuffPo), but the post is well reasoned and I learned a few things. Thanks!

BQ- Yes. This is what I was thinking... "preaching to the choir"

As for people who don't watch Top Gear... you all need to watch:

Jeremy Clarckson: Meets the Neighbours. It is available on Google Video. After this, you will understand why this whole issue is not valid.

I don't know if "it's how you drive" is totally true. Maybe "if you drive like a madman you will get poor mileage" is better.

There's no way they can get the Prius's advertised 40+ mpg out of the M3. But if they miraculously manage to do that, apply the same driving techniques to the Prius and watch its mpg soar even higher.

the Top Gear hosts are TV veterans, they are very good communicators.

If they had wanted to get across: "what you drive matters, but HOW you drive it also matters", they could have done so.

Instead they spent the whole time trying to make the Prius look bad, insinuating things about it (battery stuff) without much data, and then after a test where they don't explain why the results came out that way (with the M3 drafting behind the Prius, etc), they throw away a line about "What you drive doesn't matter, it's how you drive it".

So either incompetence, or they really tried to mislead on the Prius.

They could easily have said: "This happened because..." or "on the other hand". But no, they left the impression that a Prius really isn't much of an improvement on other cars (it's not perfect, but it's definitely better than most cars).