Tuesday, November 04, 2008

The pointlessness of a Prius

Australian Climate Madness explains the pointlessness of hybrid cars:

The latest advert for the Toyota Prius claims that by driving one for 10 years or 100,000km, you can save 7.5 tonnes of CO2 as compared to a regular petrol-engined car.

Let's put that into perspective. If you drove a Prius for, say, 70,000 years, you would save the same amount of CO2 that a large coal-fired power station generates in a day.

Moral of the story: don't fool yourself into thinking that driving a butt-ugly hybrid car is anything but a feel-good gesture.

5 comments:

Phil said...

A much better comparison is an average person breathes out 0.3285 tonnes per year of CO2.

If a family of four stopped breathing over the 10 years they owned the Prius they would reduce their CO2 emissions by almost twice as much as by buying a Prius.

Phililp B

Phil said...

BTW, contrary to all the model predictions a La Nina is forming.

http://weather.unisys.com/
surface/sst_anom.html

I forgot earlier, Jonathan. Welcome back from your trip.

Jonathan Lowe said...

lol I love it phill! Thanks mate, am back but have a stack of work to do. Hopefully I can get some statistical analysis of weather out there, but looking like a slow process at this stage

Simon from Sydney said...

Thanks for the link to my post! I have added you to my Blog Roll.

And Phil - I love that comparison - a much better one indeed, although not quite as practical!

Cheers!

Ethan said...

I enjoyed readinng your post