[SGVLUG] Especially for Tom & his Prius....

[Christopher Smith]

David Lawyer wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 09, 2006 at 10:07:06PM -0700, Dustin Laurence wrote:
>>I found this screamingly funny:
>>
>>http://youtube.com/watch?v=H_5VfwihIpo&search=top%20gear
> 
> I didn't find it funny at all.  The diesel isn't much better than the
> gasoline engine.  The energy efficiency of automotive diesels is about
> the same as automotive gasoline engines, provided one operates at near
> the maximum efficiency points in the torque-rpm plot of iso-efficiency
> curves.  The diesel is in fact inherently a pretty bad polluter.

Diesel has in fact been getting a lot cleaner recently, and we can
actually expect some cleaner diesel vehicles coming to the US market
next year (basically they trap particle emissions before letting them
out). Diesel's also are more efficient in real-world use (which is why
you tend to get better fuel economy). Finally, if you go with a
biodiesel blend (assuming you aren't light on the biodiesel) you get
significantly improved emissions... much better than with gasoline.

> Furthermore, increasing energy efficiency may make things worse per
> Jevons law (by encouraging more travel).

Agreed, but that hardly makes hybrid's a better solution than diesel.

Bottom line though was that while he makes some good points (EPA fuel
economy numbers for hybrids are even more misleading than normal
vehicles, and the Prius' display can be distracting, much like the other
LCD displays that are becoming common in vehicles), a lot of this guy's
complaints were just silly (but his delivery is quite amusing). Like
that hybrids are too slow. You can easily get a speeding ticket on the
fastest highways (the "99" wasn't kph, it's mph, so unless you are on
the autobahn, do you care?) with any hybrid I've tried, which should be
fast enough for anyone, and the hybrids actually have better pickup from
a standing start than comperable conventional vehicles (the joys of
electric motors and being generally lighter weight... although the
low-friction wheels do cut in to that a bit). The 0-60 time he quoted
also seems off (perhaps this is an old review from the original Prius),
as the usual number is 10 seconds, and you can actually do much better
if you replace the low-friction tires with something more like racing
tires (although you lose a lot of fuel efficiency with that). The Prius
might seem cheaply to someone used to luxury vehicles, but my
observation is it seemed pretty comperable to vehicles about $3k cheaper
than it ($3k which hopefully you'd recover with a lower gas bill, not to
mention tax incentives) and often even ones at the same price (not to
mention that it has a number of features that generally seem to be
available in much more expensive cars). The noise thing is just silly.
If you are relying on the roar of an engine to avoid getting hit by a
car, you're pretty much screwed. There's plenty of noise from the tires,
wheels, axles, wind deflection, etc. Of course, inside the car it seems
very quiet, because car cabins are designed to reduce outside noise.
Finally, his fuel economy test was commuting in to London, which means a
lot of driving in the open road, where Prius gets relatively crummy fuel
economy. Try doing a fuel economy comparison as a city commuter vehicle,
say navigating through downtown NYC traffic, and the diesel is going to
look quite bad.

Honestly, having recently been shopping for cars, I can tell you that
I'd have happily bought a hybrid but for the fact that a) the selection
is still quite limited compared to a non-hybrid so finding a good fit is
tricky and b) demand is so high that you end up paying well above the
sticker price if you want a car anytime soon.

--Chris