It’s hard to know what constitutes a hijack if you don’t know what the OP intended the debate to be about. dropzone and I were discussing that question in your absence.
How that discussion of what the debate’s supposed to be about constitutes a hijack, I have no idea. Rather than simply address the issue (“this debate’s about X, not about Y”) you decided to get rather heated about the fact that the discussion took place.
If I start a thread in this forum, and while I’m not there, you and another poster get into an exchange about what I meant the debate to be about, I’m not going to get all riled about it.
And how any of that constitutes junior modding, again I’m mystified. Have I suggested here that you are violating board rules? No, I haven’t. So please, stop making bullshit accusations and messing up your own thread.
But if you don’t want me making posts like this in your thread, I suggest you stop making my conduct an issue in your thread, and do so in the Pit to begin with.
The second table on that page (and it’s not like there’s even any text before or around the tables for it to get lost in) is titled “Energy Content of Fuels (in Joules)” and the number it gives for a gallon of gasoline is 1.3 x 10^8. Which is 130 million, or 130 mega, joules.
I think you are proving my point on wants vs needs, without a qualifier, what that need is for, I would argue it would default to your very existance. Putting a item like a truck in the same category as life support makes you seem very entitled.
I suspect some of the problem is most people are ashamed in saying they want a truck, they think society will look down at them, so they say I need it, as who can argue about something in the category of life support.
Yes my mistake, I see that it was **Mr. Motto. ** who said those who need a truck need a truck.
And I don’t think many of us will argue that particular point. Radical environmentalists typically don’t go to construction sites and vandalize the pickups there, to their credit. Not that they should be vandalizing trucks at all, of course.
So that makes this an apples to oranges comparison in a lot of ways, especially since costs are involved. Until very recently, preowned hybrids simply weren’t on the market in significant numbers at all, and even now poorer buyers who need a car will typically purchase an older conventionally powered one.
If we start comparing things directly, things don’t get much simpler. When my wife bought her Toyota Echo in 2000, it cost about $13,000. The Prius was about $10,000 more than that, and only offered about 10 mpg more fuel economy.
Now, since we have had the Echo, upkeep costs for it have been minimal to say the least. For the Prius, the same can be said, with the caveat that Toyota is replacing battery packs free right now. I can’t see that they will continue to subsidize this cost indefinitely.
So how long will you have to drive a car that is 10 mpg more fuel efficient to make up a $10,000 price difference? And if you have to pay for a battery pack, does that economy disappear entirely, given the length of time people typically own a car?
Whenever you come up with a figure that seems ridiculous, you should do a “sanity check”. 4.8 Million gallons of Gasoline is worth around 10 Million dollars today. Gasoline is comparable in cost with other fuels, and it certainly doesn’t cost $10,000,000 to build a car, so this number is obviously wrong…
I played this game a couple years back when I compared a standard Beetle with a Diesel Beetle. IIRC, the better mileage of the Diesel would cover the difference in purchase price after 68,000 miles, but that was when Diesel fuel was considerably cheaper than unleaded. Now, when they cost practically the same, the lines would intersect (mentally calculating) never, or not within the expected lives of the cars.
Mr. Henry is leaving out a huge part of the analysis. After 20,000 miles he has either a '92 caddy worth about $1.75 or a fairly new new Prius worth somewhere between $16-20K.
Good point. Even if we postulate (not unreasonably, IMHO) that one can get 50K miles out of one’s old junker like Scylla did, the reality is that newer cars by the better manufacturers last a long, long time: my 2000 Honda Accord has 156K miles on it, and I expect it to be my wife’s and my primary car for another 100,000 miles, after which it’ll probably last another 50K miles as our second car.
So the Accord has to be compared with not one old car, but a succession of five or six of them.
BTW, the Accord averages about 30 mpg, which means it’s used about 5200 gallons of gas in those 156K miles. A succession of 16 mpg junkers would have used about 9750 gallons over the same distance, which means the Accord has saved 4550 gallons over that span, as compared with the junkers.
While that is true for Mr. Henry, I do believe depreciation costs would have been part of the Consumer Reports analysis.
Also, I think there is another apples to oranges comparison there when it comes to insurance. Older cars not only are cheaper to insure for equivalent insurance, but in the case of Henry, he ditched expensive comprehensive conerage entirely and went with cheap collision policies.
And while this is only a cost viewpoint and not an environmental analysis, it does point out that hybrids are still more expensive to own than most other cars. Therefore, fewer people will buy them, and their impact on the environment will be muted for a time. That isn’t to say that that will remain the case, but these things do need to be accounted for.
We recently bought a Prius, so hereI am, unleasing my doggy in this fight
The website CarConnection has an interesting article on it, titled: *Prius versus HUMMER, Exploding the Myth. *
As for Scylla’s other remark, I couldn’t agree more. There is a big, big advantage to making the stuff you use yourself. If you are a “Homo faber” a making man, (and not everyone is) it gives deep satisfaction and a deep feeling of self-reliance to build something yourself, and feel you know how it works and have the means to repair it yourself if you want to. That feeling alone is worth far more then all the possible environment-related calculations.
Making stuff yourself also allows you to get attached to the things you own and use, as we grow attached to anything we put care and attention in.
I can very much relate to the concept of “joy of making”, because “design for self reliance” and the related term " adapted technology" is the core of my Dad’s work as a designer.
One more thing: Scylla’s truck reminds me of the self-built Indian motorcycle that allowed New Zealand legend Bert Munro to set some major speed records.
I couldn’t agree more but some people do things for a reason, such as saving money or giving one a project to do, with absolutely no environmental motivation in the decision at all then make some altruistic environmental claim after the fact.
You’re pretty big on attributing motives without cause. First you go all off that I said I needed a truck, which I didn’t say, and now you go all off saying I’m making an altruistic environmental claim.
FTR, I did the truck that way cause I wanted a cheap reliable truck. I got the thought about the environmental impact of reusing and extending the life of something old and less efficient versus buying something and new and more efficient from an essay on the Patagonia website. I put two and two together and thought it might make an interesting debate.
I don’t know what the fuck it is with some of you people. You could argue that the truck is more efficient or you could argue the Prius is, or you could help determine a methodology for the breakeven. Instead all you’re doing is making snide and snarky comments about other people’s motivations, motivations you are falsely attributing.
What’s the deal? Do you just get off on making yourself out to be all superior, by putting other people down.
Ok. Let’s see if we can’t go back to square one and do some decent calculations.
What we are trying to determine is whether it is more efficient to rebuild a pickup truck that gets 16 mpg and drive that or buy a new Prius that gets 50 mpg and drive that? Where is the breakeven?
Assumptions are:
It takes 73 gigajoules to manufacture a Prius
A gasoline engine obtains 15 kilowatt hours from a gallon of gas.
So, one gallon of gas is .054 gigajoules. That’s 1,351 gallons of gas to manufacture the Prius. With a 34 mile per hour differential, you have to drive the Prius 45,962 miles to breakeven with the truck and recoup your cost of manufacture.
Now, if we mechanically rebuilt the truck we might expect both it and the Prius to have a 100,000 mile lifespan which makes the Prius twice as efficient.
That seems to be the debate as I stated it, and as it turns out I am wrong, as I drove my truck 50,000 miles which is past the breakeven point (remember the caveat that only about half these miles were commuter miles. The other half the truck was doing truck work not accomplishable by a Prius.)
Inerestingly, this is a pretty extreme example, a very inneficient truck versus a very efficient car.
If for example, I rebuilt an Accord and got 30mpg the breakeven would be at or past the useful life of the vehicle.
So, I think there is some truth to my statement that you can’t buy your way green. Manufacturing greener more efficient products is good but even in an extreme example like the one I’ve given the breakeven point to cover your cost of manufacture in terms of energy is a long ways off.
Generally speaking we might state that keeping an old item in service that is not maximally efficient is a greener strategy than replacing it with a new more efficient item unless the differential is very large and the usage high.
Maybe not exactly earth-shattering news, but good to define.
A couple of more things that were outside of the scope of the debate as it was framed but are nonetheless worth considering. According to an earlier website I cited from the Government, the steel in cars is at least 25% recycled, and may be higher. The plastics, leather, and what have you that also make it up may or may not be.
Simple for the sake of argument let’s say that 50% of a typical car is from recycled material (I have no idea what the real number is.)
Outside of energy considerations than, if we say that each vehicle contains a ton of steel, than the truck ends up conserving 1000 pounds of steel for other uses, like the future, plus all the other resources used in the manufacture.
Surely that’s a good thing, but I’m not sure how we would factor in resource conservation with the energy usage to determine a combined resource/energy breakeven.
Try it this way. The steel price commodity index is about $258/ton. That adds about another 1,400 miles to the breakeven in terms of commodity cost. Should we be valuing research conservation at cost? Beats me.
Still another thing to think about is price. My truck cost $2,000. A Prius costs $22,000 or so.
According to Edmunds the Prius loses about 50% of its value over 5 years in resale value, which is about what I lost on my truck. You can read this article on hybrid depreciation and see if I’m being fair.
From a price standpoint I am $10,000 ahead by owning the truck at the end of five years. BUT, and this is a big but, if we are going to factor it this way we need to account not miles but cost of miles driven.
Going with the 34 mpg difference and giving gas a cost of $3/gallon my breakeven will be close to…
120,000 miles (back of the envelope, ballparck calculation)
As recent experience shows, you should check my math and methodology. I welcome corrections.
#2 there is backwards, for an obvious conceptual reason. That is, that the less efficient the gasoline engine is, the less important the differential is in this calculation between the efficient and inefficient engine over a given mileage, when obviously it’s the reverse of that in reality.
What you really want to do, as you said in your next paragraph, is figure how many “gallons of gas to manufacture the Prius.” That is, if you had a factory powered by electricity from a power plant that burned gasoline or some close equivalent, how many gallons would that take? So you need to know how efficient is the burning of gasoline, or some similar petroleum product, in generating electricity in a power plant.
The only cite I could find says, “The efficiency of existing European generating capacity averages at about 35%.” Let’s assume that the same holds true for Europe and Japan. That’s not great, of course, but that’s 1.4 times as good as the 25% efficiency of the automobile engine.
So that’s 1351/1.4 = 965 gallons to manufacture the Prius.
Arithmetical correction: it’s not the difference in miles per gallon; it’s the difference in gallons per mile, as I believe Measure for Measure said earlier. Scylla’s truck burns 16 mpg = .0625 gpm; the 50 mpg hybrid burns .02 gpm.
Even at a construction cost of 1351 gallons, the break-even point is 1351/(.0625 - .02) = 31,788 miles. At 965 gallons, that’s 22,706 miles.
If we want a less extreme comparison, let’s try my 30 mpg non-hybrid Accord against the truck: 965/(.0625 - .0333) = 33,086 miles.
The 50 mpg hybrid versus the rebuilt 30 mpg Accord works out like this: 965/(.0333 - .02) = 72,375 miles. That may be beyond the useful lifetime of the rebuilt Accord, but that has to be part of the equation: if you’re matching rebuilt cars against new cars, then you ought to somehow factor in the effort involved in rebuilding multiple junkers to match up against one new car. Or you can assume you’re not replacing the junker when it goes, and you’re going to be very environmental as you thumb rides.
Good Lord! I wouldn’t dream of buying a new car if I didn’t expect it to get 150K miles, absolute minimum. Excepting one car that got totalled in an accident (it’s easy to total a car you bought for $1100), I’ve never had a car pack it in with less than 156K on the odometer, and that includes cars from bygone eras, such as a 1970 Buick Skylark (227,000 miles) and a 1971 VW Super Beetle (a wimpy 156K). The '86 Accord (254K) is still the family champ for another few years; the 2000 Accord should overtake it in 2012.
Well, sure: whoever said you could? Like the enviros say, “Reduce, reuse, recycle.” That’s what you’re doing, and hey, you enjoy it too.
It’s just that if you’re arguing against a position that a hypothetical group of environmentalists holds, I think they are indeed hypothetical.
Well, not that far.
But the main thing is that not everyone’s like you. Not everyone has the skill set or motivation to rebuild old cars on a periodic basis. Most people will periodically be choosing, not between rebuilding a junker and buying a new car, but between two new cars, where the difference in upfront manufacturing costs is minimal, and the payoff for high MPG starts right off the bat, rather than 30-70K miles down the road.
What you really want to do, as you said in your next paragraph, is figure how many “gallons of gas to manufacture the Prius.” That is, if you had a factory powered by electricity from a power plant that burned gasoline or some close equivalent, how many gallons would that take? So you need to know how efficient is the burning of gasoline, or some similar petroleum product, in generating electricity in a power plant.
[The only cite I could find]
(ABB Group. Leading digital technologies for industry — ABB Group) says, “The efficiency of existing European generating capacity averages at about 35%.” Let’s assume that the same holds true for Europe and Japan. That’s not great, of course, but that’s 1.4 times as good as the 25% efficiency of the automobile engine.
So that’s 1351/1.4 = 965 gallons to manufacture the Prius.
[/quote]
That looks good.
That looks accurate, too.
Hmmm. I thought I was being generous. Honda only claims a useful life of 70,000 miles for its engines:
Now I had a Jeep Wrangler that went 240,000 miles. Surely a Honda should beat that.
This cite claims that average life expectancy is 13 years and 145,000 miles.
So, it appears your 150k is a good number. However, in defense of my 100k number we are talking about a mechanically restored pickup with a drivetrain rebuilt versus a hybrid. While I think Toyota builds nice cars, the longevity of the hybrid is yet to be demonstrated. We are clearly not comparing apples to apples here. My point was to try to get an extreme example and see where it came out, and because of the vagaries of both vehicles discussed I just went somewhat arbitrarily with 1ook.
If you were to compare mechanically restoring your Accord versus buying a new one than 150k would indeed be a better number.
I didn’t attribute the argument to environmentalists. In fact, I heard it from some.
Interesting story about me and Patagonia.
I once bought some stuff from Old Navy. It fell apart and needed to be thrown away after only a few washings. I do Ultrarunning and I had shorts literally disintegrate in the crotch during my first 50 miler. If you are running 50 miles a week you burn through a lot of shorts, socks, and shirts because you are wearing them hard.
I had a friend tell me that Patagonia stuff was bulletproof and lasted forever. I bought some stuff from them and damned if it isn’t well-made and durable as all hell. So, I bought some of their work shorts and some other clothing. It’s built for an athletic build, plain yet cool and have been impressed with them. I was impressed enough to read Yvonne’s book Let My People Go Surfing. This man has a unique credential amongst lefty environmentalists. He makes a fantastic product and he is very profitable. Patagonia seems to have succesfully integrated capitalism with environmentalism, so I wanted to see what he had to say.
Anyway, their stuff rocks and fits with my ethic of supreme quality, functionality, and durability in consumer products that I buy, and it was from them that I got the concept for this thread.
It is not that anybody is necessarily making this argument be they environmentalist or not, it’s that “buying green” is becoming an ethic in and of itself when instead it should be “consuming less and buying green when you must buy.”
I’m not arguing against anybody, just a tendency we have as a culture of consumers.
Well, no. But let’s take you for example. If you wished, you could send your Accord in to a shop and have the engine and drivetrain rebuilt, have the rust ground out and repainted, and otherwise do a full mechanical restoration on your vehicle for a fraction of the cost it would take to buy a new one. So, one wouldn’t need my skillset to do it.
I’m not telling you to do this by any means. I’m exploring the concept. It seems to me more efficient to restore a vehicle to service than to scrap and recycle it.
It’s not really something we talk about much from an environmental standpoint. As a culture we like new things, and we’d rather recycle and get a new one than fix up and restore an old one.
50 mpg cars like the Prius are still atypical. A 1979 pickup truck isn’t exactly a good candidate for an environmentally minded restoration. Comparing these two disparate things shows a proof of concept.
The breakeven point from an energy consumption standpoint, is as we have found out there at 20,000 plus miles.
The energy consumption standpoint is just one as I’ve pointed out. The economic standpoint is, I beleive accurate as I’ve stated it at around 100,000 miles. I think we still have yet to calculate the resources standpoint effectively (though I have no idea how to do so.)
