Hello and welcome
Before we start – I wanted to do this particular entry in new form of a video log, but unfortunately my equipment (laptop cam, phone etc.) can’t provide with decent quality or at least bearable in today’s Interwebs. Maybe in near future this situation will change, but for now we must stick to reading. And now to the topic at hand:
The car, the eco, the please-everything-but-Prius
Let me state the obvious: I have a serious beef with all those pseudo-eco, pseudo-cars. All of them, with the Prius as the Grand Master of this ridicule, are not reasonable in the big scheme of things.
When we think about those kind the word hybrid comes to mind – the marriage of electric motor or motors, batteries and internal combustion engine. The word eco is often labeled on cars powered with diesel engines as well. In those two particular cases let us learn the term “amortization”.
The scary but simple amortization
To put it in the simplest form: Car X comes in two engine options, A – petrol engine and B – diesel engine. The petrol engine is cheaper to buy but it has lower mileage to gallon/burns more l. to 100 km. of fuel. The diesel one is more expensive but more “economical”. So what we want to check before buying one over another is when this bigger cost while buying disappear though costs of consumed fuel vs petrol engined option – to put it in one word “amortize” itself. Ok?
Ok. Let us take this Prius on a test ride: Where I live the Prius (bare, basic option) costs around 23 800E/32 700$ (which is awfully lot for a car this size and that uncomfortable) and for comparison purposes let us take another Toyota – the Auris. It is fairly the same size, more comfortable, because it has normal gearbox while Prius has effectively one gear; this means Prius is always on high revs which is ear-killing. Auris is also lighter. In basic option it costs around 16 000E/22 000$ (which also is a lot for this kind of car, but let us stick to one brand). So the difference is 7800E. Let say we drive 25 thousand kilometers a year. From my personal experience with Auris I know it consumes average of 7l/100km. With Prius I averaged 5l/100km. After few calculations containing current price of petrol in Poland (~1.25E) and the amortization time is… Tadaaa: 12,5 years! Go with some other compact class car (maybe cheaper, but also well-made European one) and the amortization time widens.
My little demonstration of course does not include the amortization of the “eco impact” what I would call it. Prius in its floor has a “couple” of batteries. Toyota guarantees that those batteries will remain in decent shape for 5 years or 150k kilometers. Put the cost of replacing those batteries aside, those old ones have to be utilized – and if I know anything about ecology, those batteries are everything but ecological. And it doesn’t end there. Where components to build Prius come from? From all over the world, right? So what ecological impact had the transport of those components and shipping to wherever place in the world you live? I would argue that if we ran simulation for this “ecological amortization” the effects would be similar to what I’ve got while calculating the economical one.
So you want to have an ecological car?
I won’t point on any particular brand or model. What I will do is to encourage you to make an educated choice. For the eco/sustainable car you want fairly cheap to buy, fairly cheap to run car. It should be fast enough to be actively safe, it should be light and well balanced to be agile, comfortable and fun to drive enough so it won’t stress you out. Stick to downsized, maybe turbocharged petrol engines which are comparably economical, much more responsive and ecological than diesels.
The truth is that the most you can do today to be actually eco when driving is to change your driving style. Keep revs low while speeding up to cruise velocity, look ahead your road and avoid stopping violently, keep quick but steady pace. Those few simple rules should save you even couple of liters to 100km of fuel consumption without making you a slower driver.
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Take good care,
Przemek Kucia
Fancy Eco Blog 