Happy milestone for Prius – buy now or wait for Gen 3

The little hybrid that could has sold No. 1 million, more than half of them here in North America.

The Prius sells more U.S. vehicles than the non-hybrid Ford Fusion. Sales are up 21 percent so far this year, and rose 70 percent last year. Plus, Camry hybrids are up 36 percent this year.

But the sheer demand means you might not be able to get one soon. Surplus inventory has hit a two-year low, letting Toyota cut incentives to just $123 a car. Toyota also plans on raising the base price by $400.

Meanwhile, the third generation of Prius is on its way, coming in 2009.

And, all you can say is, once again, Toyota will have done it again.

The gas engine is supposed to get boosted to 1.8 liters from 1.5, yet fuel economy is supposed to be improved; Toyota says it will boost the efficiency of the battery system. It will also, supposedly, get about 3-4 inches longer and 1 inch wider, but without appreciable weight gain.

On the performance side, that would boost the gas engine from 75 to 100hp. A better electric motor could make the total max hp about 160, as opposed to the current 110.

Economy? Could go over 50mpg, at least in city driving, compared to the current 48/45 city/highway.

And, that ain’t all.

Listening to hybrid gearheads, Toyota will launch a plug-in version in 2010.

It will also, theoretically, use a lithium-ion battery, and raises the stakes against Chevy’s proposed Volt, which has no cachet or history behind it. But, that’s what GM gets, and deserves, for its lame-o history on hybrids. Toyota doesn’t want to launch, though, until it works all the kinks (of which many still exist) out of lithium batteries. Of course, that’s assuming the long-awaited, long-rumored Volt doesn’t continue to have no more existence than as GM greenwash.

Personally, I would like to see a tri-mode car, which has BOTH plug-in and full regenerative braking capacity, and takes advantage of that by boosting the battery pack and electric motor sizes. I would not pay, certainly not a big premium, for a plug-in as the sole source of electric power.

Finally, as the third-gen Prius nears market, Toyota is moving in the direction of establishing this as a separate brand, along with Toyota itself, Lexus and Scion.

This is a hugely smart move in my book. It gets back to Toyota’s hybrid cred on the marketing and sales side, and lets Toyota get a tighter focus on the engineering, design and development side.

Between that and Toyota selling half of its Priuses in North America, it seems obvious that it’s going to start building them here. And, given the paragraph above, I think it’s a no-brainer that Toyota looks at building a separate Prius plant.

And that idea of Prius as an entire brand? What if that included a Prius sports car? Something like the Prius/Lamborghini-type offspring described here. It’s for real, including a 4-sec 0-60 speed and a 155mph top-out.

Drivetrain is a 3.3L V6 plus two electric motors. Rooftop is a solar panel to power climate control system and such. It’s rated at an estimated 33mpg combined economy.

Additional pictures at the story link.

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Going green at AFI Dallas film festival

I saw one of the documentaries at the American Film Institute’s second annual Dallas Film Festival tonight. “Burning the Future” is all about mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. The movie, which will be shown in Charleston, W.Va. on Earth Day, will literally sicken you if you have the same degree of environmental sensitivity that I do.


One person director David Novack was NOT able to get on camera was Big Coal incarnate, Massey Coal Chairman Don Blankenship. It was Blankenship who, earlier this week, damaged an ABC camera in an attempt to keep from being filmed for a segment of “World News Tonight” and “Nightline,” as I blogged about yesterday. Novack joked about that when I asked him, after the film screening was done, if any coal execs had refused to talk to him.

The movie website has links to a number of other websites, including a petition from Clean Energy Action that calls on us as individuals to demand our elected officials get much more serious than they have now about energy measures, starting with a Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFÉ, standard that provides the conservation level we need on gasoline and starts kicking in immediately.

More radical than that, the petition calls on us to cut our energy use in half by 2050. I believe that is doable and that you should sign the petition.

Oh, DVDs of the movie are available at the website, too.

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Zero-emisson robots to mow the back forty this summer

[x-posted on The 2 Dollar Bill]

There's nothing like the smell of fresh cut grass and small-engine exhaust in the heat of a summer afternoon.

But the mower you're using is likely a summer-emission monster. The EPA estimates the average push mower gives off as much pollution per hour as 11 automobiles, while commercial mowers emit the equivalent of 34 vehicles over the same period of time.

So wouldn't this mower (seen in Knight Rider colors) be sweet?

She's self-propelled. Solar-powered. Heck, it even trims the clippings to "small irregular patterns" to help fertilize the lawn. (Heck, mine does that. Without the small and irregular part though. And let's pause for a brief moment for a reality check here... Does a mower really clip? I think it applies a death-whack via a sharp whirling ninja blade. Think Mortal Kombat here. If grass could scream...)

Back to the story...

The Husqvarna Group is now pushing (or not) the mower which uses as much energy as a "standard" light bulb. (Ah yes... but is that a CFL or incandescent? I knew I could trip them up).

The Brits web site has this nifty model... but it's not the solar-hybrid dealy-whopper mentioned here. But even that is better than the American version we have available.

From the UK Telegraph:

While not the first robotic mower to go on sale in Britain, the Automower is the most environmentally friendly, claims Husqvarna.

Bengt Andersson, the company's chief executive, said: "This is as green as mowing gets, without compromising on performance. Ninety per cent of Automower is recyclable, it eliminates the need for fertilisers, it is silent and it delivers perfect results with zero emissions."

Dubbed the Automower, it comes close to doing just about everything except cook you breakfast. And for those mowing in the wrong part of town... or leaving the mower behind in the wrong part of town... not to worry.

From GizMag:

The Automower is also weather proof and features an in-built theft protection system that requires a personal 4-digit code to be entered before the unit will operate.

Husqvarna has been producing robotic lawnmowers since 1995 and around 50,000 of the quiet, emission-free garden robots are already in use.

Current price: somewhere on the order of $3,000 to $5,000 clams. Ouch. But could it be worth a week of your time that you'd otherwise be spending behind the mower?

And men, the Automower... was invented by a woman named Towe Ressman. (Cue the Tim Allen grunt).

For you think global / act local peeps, this could be the practical solution to pushing grandma's souped-up rotary blade model this summer. Me? I'm stuck putting the "man" into manual labor.

See you over the fence.

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Cheney energy task force: Why didn’t an enviro group just spill the beans?

OK, we now officially know who sat in on Vice President Cheney’s energy task force in spring 2001. It had everybody from the American Petroleum Institute to Defenders of Wildlife.

Here's what I don't get.

There were representatives from legitimate enviro groups that sat in on task force meetings.

I know the meetings were on different dates, but did Cheney never mention a thing about energy companies during meetings with environmental groups? Why didn't somebody just spill the beans and leak this? Even a minor leak?

What, the vice president who’s addicted to secrecy is going to sue you over leaking information, leading to even more of it coming out in court?

Or, if Cheney remained absolutely close-mouthed, why did environmental groups decide to participate in the process at all?

Frankly, it does raise the cynicism hackles a bit, making me wonder if some groups like to keep the confrontational pot boiling because it makes for better fundraising. By participating in the process, they got some talking points; by harping on the secrecy theme without doing something different about it, they got much bigger talking points.

Cross-posted at Socratic Gadfly

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This guy is a Republican? A Southern Republican?

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, by executive order, is giving the Sunshine State auto emissions standards as tough as California’s carbon dioxide standards that are under court attack.

The orders call for emission of greenhouse gases in Florida to be cut by more than 25 percent over the next 18 years and by 80 percent by 2050.
One order copies California requirements to reduce the amount of carbon-dioxide cars release into the atmosphere, which automakers are challenging in court.
"We cannot afford to ignore this issue any longer," Crist said of the impact of carbon emissions on global climate change.

If a Democrat is elected president in 2008, watch out for Crist in 2012.

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Thoughts on Live Earth

Was it “carbon-neutral”? No, but it wasn’t promised to be.

(That said, how non carbon-neutral was it? The different venues, in total, went through more carbon than 3,000 Britons in a year.

Its total carbon footprint, including the artists and spectators’ travel and energy consumption, was likely to have been at least 31,500 tonnes, according to John Buckley of Carbonfootprint.com _ more than 3,000 times the average Briton’s annual footprint. One viewer of BBC2’s Newsnight wrote online, “Would you hold a hog roast to promote vegetarianism?”

)

If we, to use a phrase conservatives like to throw around, want an event like this to pass the smell test of a cost-benefit analysis, I think Americans have to be reminded of the costs of global warming in words of the old Fram commercials (for those of you old enough to remember):

“You can pay me a little bit now or a whole lot later.”

Or, as Gore said: “You are Live Earth.”

Can we get someone to be just a little more open to the idea of treating this issue seriously now? Can we get an elected official, whether local, state or federal, to do that? That’s the biggie. As for getting someone we know to think and act more environmentally, two things:

One is that this is word-of-mouth marketing. The other, to paraphrase what Robert Redford said, is that environmental activism needs to be about what we can do rather than what we can’t.

That said, I don’t know whether I felt “that old” or “young again” hearing a band like UB40. I liked some of the short film clips a lot, some somewhat, and felt that some were little more than video equivalents of Adbusters magazine.

That’s my .02.

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