another Prius document: Being Green

I think this is very informative John, thank you for taking the time to put it all together. It also makes me feel good, that by switching from a car that got 20 miles per gallon to a car that get's roughly 45, I am using a lot less gas to go 100 miles, and that once I reach 150,000 miles on the odometer, I would have used significantly much less gas than average.

 

It looks good. Very easy to understand until the end with lots of numbers. I would suggest adding a table of content and shed some more light on how a "clean" diesel differ in the emission. How about something about focusing just the "highway MPG" in the greenwasher section?

 

Hi John,

I think you have your terminology backward. A "Greenwasher" is somebody who pretends to be a "Treehugger" with a small ecologically benefitial project, while continuing on the same'ol with everything else. GM and the deliberately small production of the Malibu hybrid for example.

The people who mislead, usually using CNW research conclusions (which tend to be unfounded) are out-and-out liers and dupes. Maybe you can come up with a term that is less offensive to those who you wish to get your points across too.

I like your "Big Picture" page. You might add a total fuel consumed row on the bottom of the chart.

 

Nice document John. I particularly like the last graph. This should give some newcomers some "real" ammunition when encountering nay sayers.

 

Hi John,
Nice work. Could I perhaps suggest a slightly different angle on your bigger picture ? It took a while to understand what the figures were for, but now I see what you are doing. In the graph you show the fuel consumed for 1 million vehicles, each doing 15,000 miles per year at varying mixes of mpg's per vehicle.

How about this instead, or as well as ?:

You could calculate the impact of a 1% swing towards more fuel efficient vehicles PER DAY on total fuel consumption in USA. You would need some stats to demonstrate this and I have only used fictitious figs here (I'm sure some of the real figs could be derived from public sources):

Total vehicles on USA roads today : 100 million
Average commuter travel per day : 40 miles (or tables at 10, 20,30,40 and 50).
Vehicle mix by fuel efficiency (similar to what you did) :
15 mpg vehicles 30%
20 mpg vehicles 15%
25 mpg vehicles 15%
30 mpg vehicles 30%
35 mpg vehicles 4%
40 mpg vehicles 3%
50 mpg vehicles 3%

From this one could calculate DAILY fuel used and then also calculate the savings for a 1% swing from a gas guzzlin' SUV to a more efficient vehicle (Prius or other):

The saving is in taking 1% of total vehicles in the x 15mpg vehicle off the road (which would be 100m x 1% = 1 million) and replacing with a 50mpg vehicle. Simply put, the saving is :

1 million vehicles x 40 miles per day = 40million miles per day
Fuel used at 15mpg = 40 million / 15 = 2.6667 million gallons of fuel
Fuel used at 50mpg = 40 million / 50 = 0.80 million gallons of fuel
Daily saving is 1.8667 million gallons PER DAY, ANNUALISED AT 681 million gallons -and this is just for a 1% swing in vehicle ownership.

Eliminate all the 15 mpg vehicles in this example and the saving is 20.4 BILLION gallons per year if the were all replaced with fuel efficient vehicles.

Just a thought, but 20 billion gallons is a lot of money and foreign currency saved.

 

The only recommendation I have on a very good effort is to put a very quick "translation" by the different emmisions ratings. Something like:
LEV (Low Emission Vehicle) - Heavy smoker
ULEV (Ultra Low Emission Vehicle) - Light smoker
SULEV (Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicle) - Clean smoke
PZEV (Partial Zero Emission Vehicle) - Occasional smoke
AT-PZEV (Advanced Technology PZEV) - Wisps of smoke
ZEV (Zero Emission Vehicle) - Success - NO pollution at all

My preference (humor me here) - would be to rate how fast the above vehicles would kill you if left running in your garage. No one remembers initials but would really remember the "new metric" of pollution.

 

As a conservative (politically) and a disbeliever in AGW and a Prius owner, I have some input for everyone that wants to extol the values of owning a Prius to people similar to myself.

Since we don't believe that man made emissions of CO2 are 'destroying the planet', and instead that the Earth goes through cycles... there are a few things that can be pointed out to highlight why vehicles that use less gas are good.

Point out that using less gas is sending less American dollars to other countries, most of which hate us. Sending them less green is something I definitely count as a WIN.

Point out that it is HUGE inside. 5 adults can comfortably fit in it, and plenty of cargo can be hauled.

Point out that image, how we are perceived by the vehicles we drive, is ultimately unimportant.

 

That's a shocking revelation! 2010 Prius alone would save 10 times more gas than all the 2-mode trucks and SUVs combined.

 

A bit colloquial for my tastes. Consider explicitly referencing 'the MPG illusion':

Science/AAAS | Science Magazine: Sign In

Prior to that article I actually thought that hybrid SUVs were silly. On the contrary, it appears for that subset of people who insist on having large vehicles, that the switch to hybrid SUVs could save as much, or more gas than Prius. That is assuming that people who buy Prius's would buy a relatively fuel efficient car anyway. Interesting from a energy policy perspective.

As for the gentleman who thinks that climate cycling is causing the earth warming trend, you've obviously never taken a time series analysis course. Cycles can and are removed to identify trend (similar to the way that you can correct an economic time series for inflation). Not your fault, people not trained in time-series analysis don't have the skills to separate the signal from the noise. If it was easy statisticians would get payed a lot less. Anyway, I'm not going to debate the virtues of global warming science with you, most educated people put it in the category of debating evolution. Not worth my time.