Increased Prius sales in the criminal community: Gunman in Prius shoots at unmarked LAPD vehicle, police say - LA Times
Those ads are TERRIBLE. Toyota needs a new ad agency. Their ads are as crummy as their cars are great.
Reason for starting this thread? ; want something to read? " So many buy it, in fact, that it has become its own sub-brand. Since it went on sale in January this year, Toyota has already booked 18,600 Prius sales including leftovers and the 2016. This is 3,000 more units than Chevrolet recorded for the Volt all 12 months last year. By the end of March, it will have outsold what’s projected for the 2017 Volt this whole year. " Why The 2016 Toyota Prius is the World’s Most Attractive Alternative Energy Car
of course, that's always been the case. plug in's are just getting started, and not well accepted yet. prius is now a mainstream vehicle.
Plug-Ins (like EVs) won't become mainstream until the infrastucture and time variables are fixed and in place like gas pumps
It's the House of Pancakes. While a hybrid can greatly reduce the fuel consumed, it is still powered solely by that fuel. Unless it happens to be a CNG conversion, the Prius truly isn't an alternate energy vehicle.
agreed. and in the same way, electricity production is getting cleaner, but still muchly produced by fossil fuels. but gasoline can never be produced from anything but fossil fuels. as toyota stated long ago, 'hybrids are a bridge technology'. but without the bridge, we can never get across the water.
That needs the "for cheap" qualifier. Methane, methanol, and diesel probably have an edge over gasoline when it comes to production not from fossil fuels, but it hasn't been proven undoable yet. Get people into PHEVs with an ICE or fuel cell range extender that uses any of those fuels, and the reduction in fuel use could make the higher cost of renewable fuels acceptable to the public.
Don't tell Bill Gates! He's raising Billions for the breakthru ideas from his rich buddies. He says gasoline easy to pump and store so maybe that's one direction we need to go make gaso from solar power. But trees/wood gasification was used to power millions of cars in WW2. Take that gas and convert to methanol and you can make gaso from that. A few recent plants proposed in US but they did not go much past demo stage. Or stretch but take CO2 from the air go to methanol then to gasoline.
I thought it was funny in an ironic way, and this is the off-topic forum. Thanks for sharing. I'm not sure how your link is relevant to either the Super Bowl ads or the link I posted, maybe you want to start another thread in a different forum? Since the thread moved in a different direction, I'll note that I liked the Super Bowl ads and I like the new Prius a lot, it seems to be a real improvement over the Gen 3 in noise and handling. I'm probably picking up a new car in 2-3 months. I'm currently spending a lot of time in SoCal. I don't have consistent access to charging and they're not giving out green stickers currently. If both of those conditions hold true when I buy, I'm inclined to pick up a new Prius. If they change I would lean toward a new Volt, depending on the lease deals available on the Volt (I won't buy a PHEV or BEV, tech improves too quickly) and the discounts on the Prius.
I like'd the ads, but my wife is tired of seeing them on the basic cable channels. Unrelated, I caught an ad for the BMW PHEV SUV last night. The ability to make methane from CO2, water, and electricity is a big reason why I am against hydrogen for fuel. Methane has the same issues in bulky tanks and refilling, but converting it to a liquid fuel is an easy step. It can be made into methanol, and we already do that to some extent. Using it in a piston engine is also understood. Current engines can be made flex fuel M85 for the same cost as for E85. It just has many of the same drawbacks as ethanol. Audi has a pilot plant taking the methane production a step further to get what they call blue crude. It is a sulfur free syn-crude that is close in weight to diesel. So getting diesel from it is an easy step. Cheating VW aside, an diesel ICE can be as clean as a gasoline one, and Volvo has a fuel cell that uses it for fuel. Unlike methanol, ethanol, and hydrogen, we already have a distribution infrastructure in place for it. I know of no technical reason why we couldn't crack blue crude down, and reform it into gasoline. It will just add to the cost. Audi is partnered with a couple biotech companies for making renewable gasoline with microbes. I'm guessing the predicted costs favor that then. Increased cost will be an issue with making gasoline from methanol too.
