I Hate Prius Drivers

In China, Hybrids Are Tough Sell - WSJ.com By JOHN MURPHY and GORDON FAIRCLOUGH

BEIJING — At the Beijing auto show this week, companies are showing off their latest environmentally friendly technologies, including hybrid engines, electric cars and fuel-cell vehicles.

But there is little chance such innovations will help reduce the environmental fallout of the car-buying boom sweeping across China and other emerging markets like Russia and India soon.

Toyota has had disappointing sales of the Prius hybrid in China, where duties raise the price. On Sunday, it showed off its Hybrid at the Auto China 2008 auto show in Beijing.

The problem is cost. The high-tech green solutions touted by auto makers are proving to be too expensive and often impractical in the developing world, where consumers are just beginning to afford the combustion engine. For instance, in China, where passenger-car sales soared 21% to more than 5.2 million vehicles last year, some consumers are environmentally conscious, but they also care about price.

Read the entire article at In China, Hybrids Are Tough Sell - WSJ.com.

Scuppie Tales: It’s Not Just Smart To Be Green, It’s Fashionable, Too — Courant.com By GREG MORAGO

Scuppie Tales: It’s Not Just Smart To Be Green, It’s Fashionable, Too

A TOYOTA PRIUS is standard equipment for the Scuppie of today: It looks good, and is energy-efficient, too. (SHIZUO KAMBAYASHI / AP / October 9, 2007)

You may not realize it, but you probably have been noticing the growing ranks of an interesting and increasingly influential segment of our society.

You see them at Whole Foods, where they pick out the choicest and most expensive microgreens for their organic salads while sipping a coffee made from free-trade beans. You bump into them in the mall, where they’re shopping for bamboo bath towels and soy-fiber undies that they pay for using a credit card that donates to fighting AIDS in Africa. You notice them installing solar panels on the roofs of their homes, where they tend to have a Toyota Prius comfortably parked in the driveway.

Sound familiar? It should; these good do-bees with comfortable incomes have emerged from their wasteful ’80s cocoons as socially conscious citizens of a newly green planet. They are making their presence known in almost every segment of pop culture with their altruistic (yet stylish) lifestyles.

Sure you recognize them. You might even be one of them.

SCUPPIE - Socially Conscious Upwardly-Mobile Person

But what to call them? Charles Failla knows: They’re Scuppies.

Scuppie — Socially Conscious Upwardly-mobile Person — is the moniker Failla, a financial planner who lives in Stamford, has coined for a person who enjoys the good life but also wants to make life good for others on this thirsty planet (in other words, the Scuppie’s love of money does not preclude his love of nature). Failla has long recognized the growing Scuppie movement and intends to market the idea of people who have the environmental values of a Hippie and the economic drive of a Yuppie. (more…)

Writer is torn between hybrid and sticker shock

I single out the Prius because it’s the best-selling hybrid in America.

I went to Toyota of Portsmouth this past week and found four Priuses in the lot and that red one in the showroom. There were 20 available last month, sales consultant Patrick Fogarty said. A used Prius? Forget about it. The day they come in, they go out the door.

The car’s popularity isn’t new, Toyota of Portsmouth owner Jim Boyle said.

Sales have “been strong since (Hurricane) Katrina,” he said. “Awareness is certainly up. It’s been a strong seller since 2004. You can buy other Toyotas and get great mileage. People who buy them are concerned about the environment … obviously, the more they sell, the more Toyota will keep investing.”

The Toyota dealership is also going green. Used oil from oil changes is being recycled to heat the building. There are skylights and the floor has a special paint to reflect light, saving money on electricity. There are master technicians in the shop trained to work on hybrid vehicles.

It all sounds so right.

The problem is buying a Prius would cost me $100 more a month in car payments a month than I can or want to spend. (more…)

No left turns is right on - The Boston Globe

Why UPS? Because I just found out a fairly crazy fact about UPS drivers: They make a conscious effort not to make left-hand turns.

Company leaders figured out that sitting in traffic, waiting to make a left, burns way too much fuel. So they zapped as many left turns as they could from 100,000 truck routes a day.

Instead, drivers are handed computer-generated delivery routes that have them going in efficiently calculated loops, calling for left turns only when necessary.

“You start on the right-hand side of the street and you stay on the right-hand side of the street almost all of the day,” said Dan McMackin, a former UPS driver who is now a company spokesman. “The only left turn you make is to come home.”

According to the company, this simple technique saves an eye-popping amount of gasoline. “In the last year alone,” a UPS release stated, “this system has shaved nearly 30 million miles off UPS’s delivery routes, saved 3 million gallons of gas, and reduced emissions by 32,000 metric tons of CO2 - the equivalent of removing 5,300 passenger cars off the road for an entire year.”

I doubt any of us can make it through the day without left-hand turns. (Even UPS drivers can’t avoid making them in a city as congested as Boston, says Jimmy, my local delivery guy.) But I like what UPS does because it proves you don’t have to own a hybrid to save gasoline; you just need to tweak the way you drive. And you might be shocked at how much gas you can potentially save.

Still skeptical? Let me direct you to fueleconomy.gov, a terrific government website that breaks down in dollars and cents just how much fuel you waste when you drive over 60 miles per hour, have low air pressure in your tires, or fail to replace a clogged air filter.

Read the entire article at No left turns is right on - The Boston Globe.

EVWORLD FEATURE: What Price Lead?: Battery | Electric Car | Commodity By Chris Ellis

For the immediate future, the price of lead will determine the future of electric-drive vehicles

PHOTO CAPTION: Child disassembles spent truck battery on street of New Delhi, India to resell the lead to unlicensed recyclers. Photo courtesy of Occupational Knowledge International.

The recent article in the New York Times featuring an ‘epidemic’ of thefts of lead sheets from the roofs of churches in England provoked thoughts on the impact the rising global cost of lead is going to have on all types of traction battery. Below is a simple ’sanity check’ to establish the retail price per kilowatt hour, below which novel traction batteries are unlikely to dip until their technology has at least partially satisfied the global market for starter batteries.

As background, there has recently been a strong rise in lead prices, producing a rising ‘price floor’ for lead acid batteries. Last year, the price of lead peaked at $3,900, with the current price at around $2,900. A typical 12/14 volt lead acid starter battery currently has a retail price of some two dollars per amp hour. For example, a 80AH 12 volt starter battery retails for around $160, with a nominal capacity of roughly one kilowatt hour.

From the viewpoint of a battery manufacturer with a functionally competitive new type of battery which potentially can be sold into the massive global starter battery market for $160 a kWh plus a premium for its greater durability, smaller size and lighter weight, why would the manufacturer offer the new battery for any less into the much more demanding traction battery market? And this is exactly what several of the smarter companies are doing, see Firefly. The world market for new and replacement car batteries for cars and trucks is over 100 million equivalent units globally each year. In reality, these batteries will vary widely in size, but here we are just trying to get an overall feel for the total size of the market, in kilowatt hours per year. Consequently, a conservative estimate is at least 100 million kWh per year.

(more…)

More Prius controversy - Auto blog - Rick Haglund - MLive.com by Rick Haglund April 03, 2008 13:50PM

Toyota Motor Corp.’s competitors have long complained that the Japanese’s automaker’s groundbreaking Prius hybrid car has not been profitable. Several years ago, before General Motors Corp. got religion on hybrids, GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz dismissed the Prius as a marketing expense designed to place a “green” halo over Toyota. But Toyota has maintained the Prius is profitable.

The controversy has reared up again, though. Chrysler LLC Vice Chairman Jim Press, who spent 37 years with Toyota, told Business Week magazine that the Japanese government fronted the powertrain development costs of the Prius.

“The Japanese government paid for 100 percent of the development of the battery and hybrid system that went into the Toyota Prius,” Press was quoted as saying in Business Week’s March 24 issue.

Toyota on Wednesday denied getting any development money from the Japanese government. The brouhaha prompted Chrysler to issue this statement late yesterday:

There have been several news reports today concerning statements made by Chrysler LLC Vice Chairman and President Jim Press on battery development for hybrid vehicles. First of all, Press was not speaking negatively of Toyota.

In a recent interview, he referenced the close cooperation between the Japanese government and Japanese industry. He said the Japanese government strongly supported R & D (research and development) investment in battery development, and the Prius and other Japanese models benefited from that investment in industry.

He cited this as an example of cooperation between government and industry working together on public policy issues. He went on to say that he would like to see similar cooperation in the United States in order to find technological improvements that help give U.S. companies a competitive advantage.

Doesn’t exactly clear things up, does it?

Read the entire article at More Prius controversy - Auto blog - Rick Haglund - MLive.com.

Jim Press “Clarifies” Outburst that Japanese Government Paid to Develop Prius | Autopia from Wired.com By Marty Jerome

Perhaps the allegations wouldn’t have seemed so inflammatory, but Chrysler’s vice chairman and president Jim Press is, after all, a former Toyota board member and career executive with the Japanese auto giant for more than 30 years.

Early this week, he claimed that the Japanese government “paid for 100 percent of the development of the battery and hybrid system that went into the Toyota Prius.” Cerberus spokespeople have since, well, backpedaled. “He referenced the close cooperation between the Japanese government and the Japanese industry. He said the Japanese government strongly supported R&D investment in battery development, and the Prius and other Japanese models benefited from that investment in industry,” according to company officials.

Well, is it true or not?

There may have been a pang of jealousy in the man’s outburst. After all, most analysts believe that Toyota was lying when it said the Prius was profitable as far back as 2002. GM ’s Bob Lutz dismissed the Prius as a marketing expense designed to put a green halo over the company.

But production capacity and demand for the hybrid are up. Today few doubt that the Prius makes money. And in the end, isn’t this what counts? Government-industry alliances are common in Japan. They inevitably raise a chorus of “Unfair!” in the U.S. But they often get results.

The issue is pertinent to other alternative vehicles. California’s so-called hydrogen highway stands to become vapor from a lack of state funding. In a recent interview with the “Sacramento Bee,” GM’s Larry Burns, who heads Research & Development and Planning for General Motors Corp., made clear that without government help for building hydrogen filling stations, there wasn’t much use in building hydrogen cars.

Sources: AutoWeek, BusinessWeek, AP, mLive, Sacramento Bee

Read the entire article at Jim Press “Clarifies” Outburst that Japanese Government Paid to Develop Prius | Autopia from Wired.com.

The Associated Press: Japan Says Toyota Got No Money for Prius By YURI KAGEYAMA – Apr 3, 2008

TOKYO (AP) — Toyota says it got no Japanese government money to develop the Prius gas-electric hybrid vehicle. Chrysler says it did — or at least got a lot of support.

Japanese government officials said Thursday that Toyota Motor Corp. received support only in government rebates for Prius buyers, but zero funding for developing the popular model.

The trans-Pacific controversy started with a March 24 Business Week report that quoted Jim Press, vice chairman and president of Chrysler LLC and a former board member at Toyota, as saying, “The Japanese government paid for 100 percent of the development of the battery and hybrid system that went into the Toyota Prius.” (more…)

Bible-toting man in Prius leads cops on high-speed chase - San Jose Mercury News By Genevieve Bookwalter - Sentinel staff writer

A Prius-driving, Morgan Hill man led law enforcement on a high-speed, Highway 1 chase from Marina to Santa Cruz early this morning.

The event began about 2:30 a.m., when Marina police officers attempted to check on Charles Boyum, 37, of Morgan Hill, who was in his car and parked in a no-parking zone in the city.

But instead of talking with police, Boyum led them in a chase on Highway 1, and topped speeds of 90 mph as he headed north, said California Highway Patrol Officer Grant Boles.

CHP officers took over the pursuit around Buena Vista, Boles said. At Morrissey Boulevard, officers laid a spike strip on the highway to deflate the Prius’ tires and slow the car down.

The strategy worked, and Boyum pulled his car off at Emeline Avenue, where he emerged holding a Bible and took off running, Boles said.

Officers used a K9 police dog to find Boyum, who then started fighting the dog, Boles said. CHP officers tasered Boyum to bring him under control.

Boyum was not intoxicated when he led officers on the chase, Boles said. It appeared he had been living in his car.
Boyum has been charged with evading arrest, a felony; and resisting arrest and interfering with a police dog, both misdemeanors.

Read the entire article at Bible-toting man in Prius leads cops on high-speed chase - San Jose Mercury News.

2009 Prius: Not So Fast - Wheels - Autos - New York Times Blog By JERRY GARRETT

According to recent reports, it’s going to take longer for Toyota to turn the Hybrid X into the next Prius.(Fabrice Coffrini - AFP/Getty Images)

A third generation of the Toyota Prius gas-electric hybrid car has been eagerly anticipated. Though Toyota has not officially announced when the redesigned Prius would appear, unofficially, automotive journalists had been tipped to expect it sometime in 2008, as a 2009 model.

However, news reports from Japan last week said the car has been delayed by at least six months, to early 2009.

A Toyota spokesman said the company would not comment. The reason? Because no official launch date had ever been confirmed, there was no way to officially confirm a delay.

Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun, a Japanese industrial publication, reported last Friday that the delay was caused by snags in developing new batteries for the electric system. The next Prius was expected to use new lithium-ion batteries. Currently, the Prius uses nickel metal hydride batteries, which take up more space and aren’t as efficient.

Whether the delay is real or not, it appears that the battery problems are plenty real. Previously, Toyota set a goal of reducing the size of the battery pack in the next Prius by 50 percent, while also increasing its efficiency.

The delay is apparently to give Toyota engineers time to retro-fit the new Prius design with the old-style nickel metal hydride batteries they’d hoped to be rid of. At least initially, the new Prius will still have nickel metal hydride batteries, Nikkan Kogyo reported. Lithium ion power is not ready for prime time (remember all the exploding laptop batteries made of the same substance?). Lithium ion gets unstable under extreme pressure - apparently too unstable for automotive use at this stage of its development.

The apparent failure of Toyota, and its development partners, to come up with a viable next generation battery pack is a serious setback. Will its competitors use this to try to seize a competitive advantage? Calling Chevrolet: Where is the Volt?

Read the entire article at 2009 Prius: Not So Fast - Wheels - Autos - New York Times Blog.