Want to go back to feeling like a self important, self-righteous, selfish little prick without giving up your great big gas guzzling vanity vehicle? The white bread suburbanite conservatives at Machine Design are serving up just what you're looking for.People who subscribe to catastrophic global-warming scenarios sometimes buy hybrid vehicles to do their part in saving the planet. As for me, I'd be more likely to buy a Hummer if I thought man-made global warming was a real problem. The reason is simple. Though hybrids have much higher fuel efficiency, their overall energy cost exceeds that of SUVs, including the Hummer. The overall energy cost of the Honda Accord hybrid, for example, is $3.29/mile; for the Hummer H3 it's $1.949/mile...I've got a big gas guzzling Chevy truck and an old VW Beetle (that will some day run again). My old Harleys also have a pretty small eco-footprint regardless of their habit of leaving big oil prints wherever they park. I feel like such a good little environmentalist.
The clear choice is a used original VW Beetle. Its overall energy cost is a mere $0.05/mile.
The major strength of the study is that it deals only with known information. That is also its major flaw. While hybrid vehicles may have a large eco-print in the present, they have the potential of greatly reducing it in the future. Personally I think hybrids will one day be as laughable as the steam driven horseless carriage. But even that was an important step towards the rapid personal transportation devices we have today. If you still want to feel like you are doing something real for the environment while not getting scowled at by the more ignorant of the hippies, convert an old diesel Bug to run bio-diesel or straight vegetable oil.The statistics come from the Dust to Dust Automotive Energy Report by CNW Marketing Research. And the Hummer is still a piece of shit.
2 comments:
In the first paragraph he notes the cost per mile of an H3 Hummer which is a small SUV based on the Isuzu/GM compact GMT355 pickup platform, but later on switches to talking about the H2 which is a much larger vehicle, and according to the source it has a cost per mile of $3.585, higher than either of the hybrids he discusses, which renders any advantage due to cheaper raw materials and disposal costs moot.
He's either sloppy in his analysis or deliberately twisting the truth.
Definite agenda.
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