The fact that the nickel is shipped to China says far less about its toxicity than it does about relative labor costs.

The nickel mining is still a problem in Ontario and the fact that Toyota ships this to China is indicative of how toxic these materials are. Having said that, there’s no way around the fact that you have to have batteries in a vehicle that has an electrical power source. Indeed, even plain-ol-cars have batteries, although they are lead acid and not nickel metal hydride. Let’s agree that this is a problem that needs to be addressed as part of the manufacturing and sourcing process that Toyota uses.

Re the Hummer, I’ve never had one so I can’t state the mileage with any authority, but we did have a Yukon Denali that is basically the same vehicle as the H2 (which is a Tahoe chassis), and with the 6 liter engine and full time AWD it got 17mpg on average… which doesn’t reflect well on your X3!

I am always on the lookout for media bias and expect that it exists on all sides all the time. That’s why blogs like this are good, where we can debate it in the open.

Lastly, I’m glad you mentioned the TDI. I really pray that California realizes that diesel is a positive development and encourages TDI vehicles and Mercedes new Bluetec. I would have bought the Touareg v10 TDI instead of the Denali if I could have bought one in CA

Sorry for the slow reply – on vacation.

As I understand the argument against CNW, the stated impacts of nickel mining are based on outdated data. While Sudbury, Ontario was indeed a disaster and is still quite a mess, due to changes in processes and standards since the 1980s, the impacts of mining there now are substantially lower than they were then. CNW (apparently) chose to base their costings on the 1980s impacts.

Agreed that the Prius isn’t quite as great as painted but in my estimation, if you’re looking at the best combination of economy, emissions and size/comfort it is fairly hard to beat. The cars people always quote as alternatives usually fall down on one of those, Jetta TDIs on emissions, Aveos on size/comfort. A Prius is close to the size of a Camry!

I would be pretty shocked if anyone got really 14mpg out of an H2, my BMW X3* gets 18 (my real-life number) and that is 2000lbs lighter than an H2.

(* I never said I was a saint )

Anyway, regardless of whether you accept any of the above arguments as valid, don’t you think it is a sad comment on the state of the reporting on this subject that the article you linked just passes CNW’s statements on without any kind of critical filter whatsoever?

Cheers

..Mark..

P.S. Don’t start flaming me, I’m not a global warming denier, just think its crazy that people think their financial irresponsible Prius will do anything net positive for the environment.

Let’s talk facts, shall we?

- clearly the 100,000 mile lifetime of the Prius is understated. Toyota’s own testing on the first gen batteries concluded a 180,000 mile lifetime and the current gen batteries are, simply put, better in weight and life expectancy. The Pro Prius crowd gets this argument.

- The CNW critics point out, rightfully, that the cost of the fuel required for the Hummer (not quite 9mpg as critics frequently quip, more like 14, which certainly isn’t anything to brag about mind you). This is a valid argument.

The problem is that neither of these arguments address the environmental impact of nickel mining in Canada and the acid rain that is a byproduct of the processing. Furthermore, these are issues that Toyota itself could address but instead they, and their supporters, don’t.

Adding to all of the above is the undeniable fact that the mileage originally reported under the flawed EPA guidelines wasn’t anywhere close to what these vehicles were actually getting. From an economic basis, as I have written about on many occasions, the Prius just isn’t the bargain it is marketed as, and as the CNW study points out, you can get a Chevy Aveo as a fraction of the cost and get the same mileage.

This is usually the point where critics point out emissions but their are a wide range of ULEV, SULEV and PZEV vehicles on the market that don’t enjoy the fashion appeal that a Prius does, but also cost a lot less. My 2007 Mercedes is a ULEV vehicle despite having 400 hp.

The CNW study that the Recorder article is based on has been around for a while and has been pretty thoroughly debunked (Google will get you there quickly enough,) but it’s a pretty seductive little myth – a “Fact Too Good To Check”.

I’m curious to see how the ethanol issue plays out on this front. There is a lot of VC money going into this, as well as government attention (never a good thing, ultimately), yet ethanol as a fuel is not a great alternative when you look at the amount of energy required to produce one unit of ethanol.

It’s quite typical, “only what we see is what we see” forgetting all about the big picture. (This goes for the VCs and markets too… especially so perhaps).

That said even the article pointed to forgets “time”, or rather how efficiently we manage to produce some value (it be stuff or travel or joy) in the time we’re allotted. This because we all consume every minute we live so if we’d be able to increase our value creation in the time we create value it would equal or better decrease in direct consumption.

In fact I think it would be easier to increase value-creation-efficiency than consumption-efficiency, but both is best of course. (I consume 24 hours in exchange for 8 hours work thus 25% more efficient work time would equal 6 hours of no driving, no TV, no heating, no A/C, no eating, no nothing)

Thus Shai’s work at SAP was truly “green tech” – he’s just did not “see” it!

But of course we believe there may be greener alternatives to SAP systems of course, don’t we?