I'm there with you, most of the way.
But regarding the Prius; it's nothing but delusion. It's got a battery loaded with nickel, a viciously poisonous strip-mined metal (Prius nickel is mainly sourced from Canada, if I recall correctly). It needs to be shipped overseas in dirty great cargo boats to be processed, then shipped again to be assembled. If one of those ships should sink, you've got environmental disaster all over your paws. Even just getting the parts from factory to factory consumes more fuel and emits more fumes, adds to the cost of the car and generates more pollution.

The Prius is a step in the right direction, but it's barely on the road to approaching a solution to The Problem. It's still built with dirty components, requires inordinately dirty industrial processes and consumes unbelievable amounts of natural resources, in order to generate a MPG rating that my father's Dirty Diesel Skoda Superb can beat in a headwind. If you're determined to be a smug envirodouche, buy a Prius and you've hit home run. Or an oncoming car.
(blueberrypossum wants to Jaffa your Cake, Tue 13 Apr 2010, 6:09, 1 reply)

Sorry, but bullshit.

Well, actually you have some fair points but some of your post sounds like you took it from that 100% bollocks "Prius vs. Hummer" story that was going round a while ago. OK, a Prius has a few kilos of toxic Nickel in it (and not as much as you think). Well, every other car on the road has a few kilos of also rather toxic lead in it. If you're thinking of those pictures of a devastated landscape in Canada labelled "that's where the nickel for Prius batteries comes from", that was bullshit - the mine closed long before there ever was a Prius. Nickel-based batteries are also quite recyclable, and last as long as the rest of the car (which is as long as any other modern car), so it's not like there are piles of spent Prius batteries piling up anywhere. And the waffle about oooh, the terrible pollution from shipping components around - you think that's different for any other car? And even so, it's actually a rather small part of the car's overall environmental footprint. EDIT: Oh and environmental disaster if a Nickel-carrying ship sinks? Well, am I ever glad that the oil being transported around the world on great big cargo ships doesn't have that problem!

But you have two fair points. One, it's still a dirty car and only a tiny step in the right direction. I'm pretty sure *very* few people, even Prius drivers, would disagree with that. Well, I may be biased as my parents have a Prius (and would prefer something cleaner, obviously), but I've never met any example of the "smug eco-douche" type of Prius driver. I *have* met smug eco-douches who scoff at me for driving at all, rather than cycling 500 miles to visit my parents over Christmas or something, though... also, of course scrapping a good car and replacing it with a brand new Prius is stupid - but if you're in the market for a new car anyway, I don't think it's worse than any other.
Secondly, yes, many European diesels get better MPG ratings than the Prius and are cheaper. But firstly, subjectively, the Prius is quite a nice car, and not that small, you can't compare it to a diesel VW Polo or something. And secondly, diesels are much dirtier in emissions other than CO2 - particulates, nitrous oxides. This is an issue particularly in the US, where emissions standards are so strict that it's hard to make a diesel that's legal over there, and if you do it's not that much cheaper than a Prius...
(julius, Tue 13 Apr 2010, 12:17, closed)