With all respect and admiration to the Toyota motor company, I do have an issue: The Prius.
The Prius. Where to start? Gutless piece of shit. Smug owners. Ugly as sin. Or, the simple fact that it’s actually not really helping anything. Greenhouse effect? Not helping. Pollution? Not helping.
Manufacturing the electric components, aluminum parts, and the NiMH battery pack requires a significant amount of energy; more energy is required to manufacture a Prius than that of a similar gasoline powered vehicle. There is some real debate as to whether the energy savings during its operational life pays back its initial energy overhead. Ain’t that a bitch? In equal units the fucking smug, slow, ugly, poor handling piece of shit may use more energy than it saves. Ha!
Independent studies show that the fuel economy is exaggerated – even more than most cars (never mind the EPA estimates).
A more relevant observation may be its comparison against smaller (but less comfortable) compact cars, which can be considerably cheaper to purchase (in some cases around half of the initial cost) while delivering perhaps 2/3 of the mileage performance in non-city driving. Real world mileage is similar to comparable sized diesel cars (but diesel sucks).
A real hippie environmentalist without a car would choose a used Honda Civic over a new Prius 100% of the time.
Smug, liberal suckers. What are you saving? The earth or your money? Clearly it’s your personal wealth. Hybrids aren’t the answer to saving your neighbors. You don’t care about saving oil – why would you want to even save oil? Prolonging a problem doesn’t make it go away. Prius sales increase when gas prices increase, not when demand wanes. I understand that after around 6 years or 8 years the batteries need to be replaced. Uh, what then earth saver? How are you going to dispose of 900 pounds of poison? Or, do you care?
Rescue personnel hate battery-powered cars. Post-crash, they are an electrocution hazard. And, since they suck for performance, they are a traffic hazard. Blam!
Prius – a car for selfish people. I’m perfectly happy buying premium gasoline and not calculating my mileage. I drive fast, careful, and enjoy the shit out of my car. It’s a car. I go from here to there to here and have a lot of fun doing it. I don’t see Prius drivers having fun (or maybe people who don’t like fun drive Prius).
I advocate using every drop of petroleum as soon as we can. The US government won’t attack countries on the other side of the planet for their wind farms. I’ve even stopped flipping off those poor dickless suckers in Hummers. They are part of the solution.
