Toyota Prius joins the Sportback
- Thread starter benw123
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Much like a Subaru Impreza, you buy a Prius for what it does, not what it looks like, although I do agree that looks are very important to most buyers - one reason I bought the Sportback was because I thought it looked cool.Yet I don't need to get all defensive over the Prius' looks, because it's hard not to feel smug when you're sitting in silence in traffic with an indicated 58.5mpg (this morning's run) while everyone else is burning fuel at £1.15 or £1.28 a litre. Well, me and all new EfficientDynamics BMWs of course!
The irony is that California has very tight restrictions on diesel-powered passenger cars because of the exhaust particles. I remember driving there around six or seven years ago, and you'd see a sign outside a gas station saying "we now sell diesel!". It's never really taken off.
Toyota are working on a diesel Prius. One snag is the increased weight of the engine, which negates some of the benefits of the hybrid design. It still sounds a worthy step forward to me. Another consideration is improved battery technology. Li-ion is an obvious example, although many owners of Laptop computers with the technology never realised their home had an open fire until they started using them! Probably best avoided.
synthdood
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Here in Holland the larger SUV's are hardly selling at all at the moment. For example, in Q1 only four Range Rovers were sold, country wide! Cayenne, Hummer, same thing. The dealers are only selling a fraction compared to Q1 2007. Probably also has something to do increased tax on large cars this year, aparently a lot of SUV's were registered in december to avoid the higher tax. I am guessing the sales will increase again, but probably never quite recover.
For a little over £9k extra on top of a normal Prius, you can buy an Amberjac version which has a lithium ion phosphate battery and claims of 130mpg. It does this simply by going further on the battery and also by being able to recharged at home (I understand the next Prius will also feature home charging).Full article and test drive here.
Yet I don't need to get all defensive over the Prius' looks, because it's hard not to feel smug when you're sitting in silence in traffic with an indicated 58.5mpg (this morning's run) while everyone else is burning fuel at £1.15 or £1.28 a litre. Well, me and all new EfficientDynamics BMWs of course!
But how many of us genuinely care about fuel economy to that extent?
well since I brought my car to central london he is getting a steady 28mpg!!!!! wow!!! Best I could do in Portugal was 22-24!!
Pedro
Pedro
Must be the cool air !!
Pedro, in Porto tomorrow will drop you a line.
Mark
:sign_ot: Sorry
So did you actually needed a second car? Fair enough if you did but it just seems wrong on so many level if you spent thousands on a new car just to save a few hundred ££ on petrol and road tax a year.
Good point - this was something I considered at length. But my wife has our 21 month-old son to look after and too often she would/will need to use the Sportback, particular while some recent extension work was carried out on our house.
This was also why if we were going to go back to being a two-car family, the next car had to be as cheap as possible to run.If you factor in depreciation - without obviously the initial expense of buying a car - against the train, there's actually little in it in terms of monthly costs. But since depreciation is the "hidden" cost of motoring, where you're not actually paying money each month for it, our monthly outgoings are now much lower.
One other important aspect which I didn't mention is that since the car journey is quicker, particular in the evenings where I can save around 30 minutes instead of waiting for a train at Kings Cross, I get to spend more time with my son before he hit the hay every night - very important to me.
boggysv
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What is this 60odd mpg that you speak of, and why have I not heard about it
Srsly, the S3 can be such a pain at the filling station. I tried to do a 65mph long cruise, and only averaged an indicated 36mpg. Filling up the next time and doing some maths, it's actually a tad lower.
Congrats on the new ride btw.
Srsly, the S3 can be such a pain at the filling station. I tried to do a 65mph long cruise, and only averaged an indicated 36mpg. Filling up the next time and doing some maths, it's actually a tad lower.
Congrats on the new ride btw.
One of the criticisms levelled at the Prius was that its official 65.7mpg combined figure was almost impossible to achieve in the real world. Jeremy Clarkson drove one from his home in Oxfordshire to London and only saw 44mpg, and The Times Motoring team drove both a new BMW 520d and a Prius to the Geneva Motor Show with the BM achieving greater fuel economy.What is this 60odd mpg that you speak of, and why have I not heard about it
However, both Autocar and Auto Express ran a Prius in a long-term test, and in urban conditions they were getting very close to those official figures. This is what drew me to look into the Prius in the first place.
This morning, after resetting the consumption display before setting off, I saw 60.1mpg (up on 55mpg yesterday, and 58mpg the day before). I was a little bit lucky really - I caught a few green lights on some downhill sections where I could run in EV mode for longer. I think if I reset the computer after the engine has warmed up and finished its run down the A1(M) with a full battery, I could be well over 65mpg - might try that tomorrow!
Eeef
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Prius: More Enviro Harm Than A Hummer
Eat my CO2, DiCaprio! Up your tailpipe, Maher!
Leonardo and Bill are but two of a plethora of Hollywood hype-buyers who drive about in their Priuses with smug superiority, sure that they are greener than thou. But they would be better off driving a Hummer.
That's right. The total cost of energy (that's manufacturing and operating costs) for a Prius is $3.25 per mile over the 100,000 miles you can expect it to run. A Hummer on the other hand is expected to run 300,000 miles (You know the old saying, "GM cars run bad longer than most cars run.") at $1.95 a mile.
OK, maybe you're not going along with that 300,000-mile Hummer. So give the Hummer a 150,000 mile life -- that's still $2.93 vs. the Prius' $3.25.
That's just the conclusion of a fascinating article by Chris Demorro that ran last week in the Central Connecticut University Recorder. Here's the much juicier stuff:
Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the dead zone around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.
The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalists nightmare.
The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside, said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a British-based newspaper.
All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesnt end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce nickel foam. From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce?
Demorro's piece is damning, indeed, and he doesn't even touch on the energy costs involved in recycling the Prius' batteries once the car goes to the junk yard.
I remain, and probably shall remain for the foreseeable future, a fan of the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine. Gasoline burns incredibly efficiently and engines have become gas-sippers (I get 19.1 mpg in my 325 hp German V8) with very low emissions.
Behind the wheel of your gas-fired car, you may not be Oh, so cool driving down Rodeo Drive among the Prius glitterati, but you'll be driving the smarter car.
Eat my CO2, DiCaprio! Up your tailpipe, Maher!Leonardo and Bill are but two of a plethora of Hollywood hype-buyers who drive about in their Priuses with smug superiority, sure that they are greener than thou. But they would be better off driving a Hummer.
That's right. The total cost of energy (that's manufacturing and operating costs) for a Prius is $3.25 per mile over the 100,000 miles you can expect it to run. A Hummer on the other hand is expected to run 300,000 miles (You know the old saying, "GM cars run bad longer than most cars run.") at $1.95 a mile.
OK, maybe you're not going along with that 300,000-mile Hummer. So give the Hummer a 150,000 mile life -- that's still $2.93 vs. the Prius' $3.25.
That's just the conclusion of a fascinating article by Chris Demorro that ran last week in the Central Connecticut University Recorder. Here's the much juicier stuff:
Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the dead zone around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles. The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalists nightmare.
The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside, said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a British-based newspaper.
All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesnt end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce nickel foam. From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce?
I remain, and probably shall remain for the foreseeable future, a fan of the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine. Gasoline burns incredibly efficiently and engines have become gas-sippers (I get 19.1 mpg in my 325 hp German V8) with very low emissions.
Behind the wheel of your gas-fired car, you may not be Oh, so cool driving down Rodeo Drive among the Prius glitterati, but you'll be driving the smarter car.
Interesting post Eeef, it is quite shocking how much environmental damage manufacturing those batteries causes. However for the average John Smith out their buying their Prius wouldnt care how the car is made behind the scene as long it it saves them money on petrol and road tax. Quite sad really especially when those Eco warriors starts an argument about how eco friendly the Prius' are and how little CO2 it produces, Since when did CO2 become a 'polluting substance'? If it was then maybe we should all stop breathing? In reality those low CO2 producing diesel chucks out way more polluting/toxic substances than their petrol counterpart, yet diesel is somehow hyped as like it's nature's best friend.
Please take time to read this thread carefully - I've already posted a link to clear this well-known slur up but for the benefit of others I'll post it again:
http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-417227/Toyota-factory.html
Funny, I followed one home this evening. Yes I did consider it, although never went as far as test driving it. The reviews put me off; they said that the transition between electric and petrol was a bit jerky, and the technology in the Prius has been around for around eight years which is more proven.
