...
"...I read an article once that declared the most environmentally friendly vehicle in the world to be...the Landrover Defender..."

Unfortunately bollocks though! (the original article started off with a jeep but was changed for the UK market).

To arrive at this startling conclusion, they made some fairly questionable assumptions, including the rather odd proposition that buying a jeep will make you make you drive twice as far per year as you would have done if you had bought a prius!


The simple fact is that for pretty much all cars, the majority of CO2 emissions come from fuel rather than construction and the longer the car lasts, the truer this becomes.

Basically its the result you would expect if a car company asked a marketing company to conduct the 'study'... which is pretty much what happened here.
(silene, Thu 19 Feb 2009, 19:53, 1 reply)

what?
"So, Mr Ford, thanks for the bribe. What result would you like"

"Well, my dear researcher, I'd like you to tell people NOT to buy new cars."

Yeah, you can totally see that happenning. If it had decided that you should buy new cars "because they're 0.07% greener than last years model, which is good!" then I'd agree with you.

Didn't the Humvee come out pretty well in the TenvironmentalCO stakes too, due to being simple and made of fairly basic materials- and probably crap examples of those materials?
( uberdeity Wondered why Owen Lars knew of the term "hell" on, Fri 20 Feb 2009, 10:21, closed)

No..
..more likely that Mr Ford was getting a bit worried that large American cars were becoming less competitive than hi-tech Japanese models in their traditional heartland.

Anyway, even the company that did the research (after a few fairly critical analyses and reports) repeated their own analysis and came to some very different conclusions.... See here if you're interested cnwmr.com/nss-folder/automotiveenergy/107%2008%20Models%20Cost%20Per%20Mile%20From%20Low%20to%20High.xls

EDIT: The basic point is that it's easy to mislead if you aren't explicit about the question that you are asking. In this case they asked the question: "which vehicle use the most energy (per mile) over its lifetime?" and did a fairly good job of answering it. However, a gullible press and public took this as equal to the question: "What car should YOU buy if YOU want to to minimise YOUR energy usage?"

In this case, the difference arises from factoring the driver into what could otherwise have been a comparison of the cars. i.e. it is fairly obvious that Mr Prius driver is worried about his energy use (why else would he buy such an ugly car). It seems odd to think that after reading the report and rushing out to buy his hummer, he would suddenly double his annual mileage in order to spread the manufacturing energy cost over the lifetime milage of the car (as would be required to reproduce the efficiency listed in the report).

Whether there was an intention to mislead is another matter (possibly I was a bit intemperate with my comments above), but this sort of thing irritates me.
(silene, Fri 20 Feb 2009, 11:28, closed)

I can't debate the accuracy of the study, because I don't have that information. You might well be right; the results may be dodgy. But it does start you thinking down a better route, considering the impact of the car's entire life, not just the running of it.

If it leads to just one person thinking about the issue on his own and deciding to keep his current car because the small reduction in pollution of the new model would be offset by the massive increase in pollution through manufacturing a new car to replace one that's still running fine, then it's done okay.
(Musuko, Fri 20 Feb 2009, 13:21, closed)