Malibu Hybrid... WHY???

Re: Why? It's cheaper and not appreciably dirtier

1) Ocean bulk transport is the most energy efficient form of transport, so the energy cost of moving the car across the ocean is small. This source:

Estimates of Total Fuel Consumption

shows large ocean freighters at roughly 1000 ton-miles per gallon in the best-case scenario. That would mean 9 gallons of fuel to move the Prius from Japan to the West Coast (1.5 tons x 6000 miles / 1000 ton miles per gallon, roughly).

The same source shows unit trains at about 500 ton-miles per gallon. So, shipping the Prius to the East Coast takes about as much fuel as shippig it from Japan (1.5 tons x 3000 miles / 500 miles per gallon = 9 gallons).

2) A typical car will use 3 starting batteries over its lifetime. The typical lead-acid starting battery weighs about 50 lbs, half of which is lead. So, the typical car uses 75 lbs of lead for its batteries, lifetime. (I looked up the sources for this in a much earlier thread here and don't want to take the time to repeat them.) Lifetime, a Prius will use 30 lbs of nickel in the traction battery and (arguably) about 24 lbs of lead (two small, non-starting batteries). The Prius uses less metal for batteries than a traditional car, over the lifetime of the car. Lead is toxic, and I could find nothing to suggest that lead smelting is any cleaner than nickel smelting. In fact, although the much-discussed Sudbury nickel smelter was a large point source of pollution, the US never sued Canada over it, whereas the US did, once upon a time, sue Canada over a large lead smelter on the border.

TRAIL Case

3) Over a 150,000 mile car life, at the EPA estimated mileage, at $3/gallon, the Prius would burn about $7000 less gasoline than the Malibu. For a purchaser intending to own the vehicle for its lifetime, that's the relevant cost savings to factor in, and that makes Prius much cheaper than the Malibu. Even for a shorter ownership period, all other things equal, the remaining cost savings ought to factor into the resale price. In other words, somebody's going to pay that extra $7K to fuel the Malibu, so that's the right way to look at the relative cost of the two vehicles, all other things (e.g., quality, durability) assumed equal.

I looked at the Malibu and thought that it was a nice car, but my reaction was pretty much the same as the OP here (minus the "junk" comment). It's about the same interior volume and same purchase price as a Prius, but uses twice as much gas. Poster Malorn here said in another thread that GM aimed the Malibu for comparison with the Accord and Camry, not the Prius. So be it. My take on it is that GM just put a lot of effort into trying to win last century's battle.

 

Not a good comparison. At least the Lexus is rated very clean, smog stds. The Malibu rates poor on both. Not that I commend Lexus for a guzzlin hybrid ... but for real world driving, the malibu potentially reaches a ton of buyers, whereas the $100 cars are maybe for 1/10 of 1% of the population.

 

Re: Why? It's cheaper and not appreciably dirtier

You didn't read the review, did you. It states that it's NOT better, smog wise.

 

I agree with you -- very sad. Maybe I should have stressed the word "inventive?"

 

I appreciate your thoughtful recitation of source material. However, I am not buying the Iowa study on fuel consumption of ocean going vessels. The rate at which a ship consumes fuel is nonlinearly related to both speed and amount of fuel in the ship's tanks. One also needs to consider the pattern of the ship's travel. The problem of finding the velocity pattern (as a function of time) necessary to move the ship between two fixed points in a fixed amount of time needs to be considered. I am unwilling to say that the average car carrier consumes one gallon for every 1000 tons of dry weight and cargo per mile.

My comment about "dirtier" did not relate to the use of the nickel battery and the smelting concerns that the nickel has caused in canada or the need to ship the refined nickel to China for processing. Instead, I was commenting on the many metric tons of polutants ocean going ships put in the atmosphere each month.

The polution and fuel consumption of cargo ships has gone relatively unstudied, causing the State of California to issue survey questionaires to all shipping companies in 2007 in an attempt to collect useful data.

I am willing to accept your computations of fuel consumption and cost for the cars, but I think your use of a 150,000 mile per owner number is optimistic. I am in my early sixties and I have never owned a car that I drove 100,000 miles, let alone 150,000 miles. So the per vehicle cost for me and those like me would be significantly different.

With this said, I am not trying to beat up on the Prius. We have an `08 package 6 touring edition and we really like it. It is one neat little car. I wouldn't want it as my sole vehicle, but as a 3rd car it has become a workhorse for commuting. Toyota did a great job with it.

But I think GM is doing well making cars like the Malibu. Maybe it can turn from being a truck company into being a hybrid car company.

 

I'm on the road so I don't have my logs at hand. My '75 leMans had 135,000 miles on it when it was SCRAPPED. My '83 Delta 88 had much more than that when it was donated (and most probably scrapped). My '89 Delta 88 had over 250,000 miles when I gave it to my neighbor. I expect my car to last 17 years. If my Prius only lasts 150,000 miles I will be extremely disappointed.

Dagrunner, I understand your point of view. You probably can't get 100,000 let alone 150,000 cost effective miles out of Detroit's products. Different ball game now. Taxi fleets put twice that mileage on their 1st & 2nd gen Prius without significant repairs.

Now we know why the Volt needs a 10 speaker stereo system.

 

Some people still believe that GM makes a higher quality car than Toyota.

 

Especially for a Chevy. The hybrid thing aside, what gets me is all these reviews in the car mags and the NY Times including some Car of the Year awards. Handling, comfort, great. But is this car going to last 150,000 miles? Our 1993 Camry is still working fine, though with an expected increasing number of repairs at 200,000 miles.

Far as I am concerned the thing could ride like the ideal cross between a Lamborghini and a Rolls Royce. But if its going to be junk in 10 years, fuggedaboutit.

 

I have a coworker who had a Malibu that only made it to 8 years when it blew the head gasket. The repair cost was more than the value of the car so it was effectively totalled. She was under 100k IIRC. She drives a Hyundai Sonata now that has a 10 yr 100k powertrain warranty.

 

Dagrunner, I understand your point of view. You probably can't get 100,000 let alone 150,000 cost effective miles out of Detroit's products.


I did not make my point clear. I don't want to drive any car 150,000 miles. Longevity is only important to me as a factor in resale. It is on this latter aspect that you and I can agree that longevity is important. By the time any car I own has 100,000 miles on the clock, it will be in the hands of another.

 

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Taking the tax credit into account, a Malibu Hybrid is only around $500 more than an equivalently-equipped ICE-only Malibu. I haven't done a cost-benefit analysis but I would imagine even with the minimal improvement in fuel mileage, if one were in the market for a Malibu, it would probably be worth the minimal extra coin to get the hybrid version.

Without the tax credit, though, I'd definitely pass, not to mention the substantial risk of buying a GM product with a complicated hybrid system.

 

You do realize, how wasteful in terms of resources this is.... And I don't mean money.

 

GM "doing well"?

If you call losing $38.7 billion in 07 (a record for any automaker) and their North American operations losing $1.1 billion last quarter "well", then you're living on another planet. See GM reports $38.7-billion loss in '07 - Los Angeles Times and many other articles on this.

Toyota on the other hand (per Toyota's profit rises, lifted by emerging market sales - Feb. 5, 2008) had a profit of $4.29 billion for the last quarter and projects a $15.91 billion profit for the fiscal year.

 

Do you have any studies that contradict the Iowa study or are you taking an intuitive guess?

 

Read the study. It is a SWAG and anything but difinitive. Why won't California rely on it?

 

Well, it was in line with the other studies I found. Just takes a little Googling. digging. For example, the US DOT says inland barges (which, recall, are smaller and therefore less efficient than ocean-going cargo shps) get more than 500 ton-miles per gallon.

ARC | Research Reports

In this study of oil tankers, the lowest efficiency cited (gray tables) works out to about 670 ton-miles per gallon; the highest is about 3x that.

http://tapseis.anl.gov/documents/docs/Section_4_9_May2.pdf

But the exact number just doesn't matter.

Try it this way. Nobody says ocean freighters are less efficient than cars. If they drove the cars from Japan to the US, it would take about 120 gallons of gas. That's less than 1 year of gas savings for the Prius relative to the Malibu.

I wouldn't bother to respond at this length but that notion that there's a big energy costs of moving goods across the ocean gets tossed around a lot. It's one of those things that seems pretty reasonable, but it's just wrong. The energy penalty for bulk transport of high-valued goods by sea is low. It just doesn't much matter. That's part of the reason we import and export so much stuff.

 

I must be confusing this report with another then. I've seen the same conclusions (that large scale oceanic transport is efficient) reached from other sources during my natural resource conservation class so I'll take a look at my texts again.

It is similar to the idea that roses grown and shipped to Britain from Holland require 6x the energy than growing roses and shipping them from Kenya to Britain due to many factors that are not intuitively calculated.

 

Perhaps it has more comfortable seats.

 

The Malibu I used to have certainly didn't.