Unusually reasonable article Have to keep an eye on that guy, hadn't seen his articles before.

Rob

Second that, very well done. Would have been nice to do a Matrix than a Corolla or compare it to Camry in addition to Corolla, but that seems to be the prevailing comparison group (even it really shouldn't be).

Seems like several of the slate articles try to look at both sides of the issue.

Not only is the article well done, there is a link inside to a nice refutation of the dust-to-dust gibberish that seems to resurface with the frequency of a zombie in a "b" movie. So its doubly good.

When you buy a used car, you snatch it away from the next used car buyer, who also snatches one from the next, and so forth, until the last buyer is stuck with the worst car on the lot. He buys it because he can only afford the very cheapest, and saves it from the shredder.

When you buy a new car, the used car buyers get another better car to choose from, and at the end of the day, the worst car on the lot gets sent to the shredder to make room for the better used cars.

So, as long as there are cars like some of these dirty old gas guzzlers for sale, then sell your old car as soon as you can afford a new Prius. Flood the market with more environmentally friendly cars and bump those dirty old gas guzzlers off the lots and into the shredders (to be recycled of course).

Nice !!! Finally - I can end those arguments at work vs buying a $14,000 Hyundai.

Last line says, a Prius is hard to beat-I disagree

if it is that close then just buy a one year older Corolla-or one of the many other sound choices of vehicles and you could skip the certificated car cost and easily have a much lower carbon footprint than a Prius.

A Prius is now old technology-just like a car from the 70,s was to a Prius, the Prius is to electric or a reliable used car. Just look on Ebay for a used car and you will find many good cars there- The analogy is similar to the person that wants a purebred (new dog) and can't go to the animal shelter to save the life of a perfectly wonderful loving creature that is just as good if not better.

People need to think about what they need not what they want-average speed of a car in Los Angeles is 25 mph, what do you need?

What exactly are you trying to say? Your post was more of a rant than a clear refutation. Try re-writing it to make your points clear so that we can analyze them.

Code Blue, thanks for posting this up!

Sorry to be the naysayer, but he still did the analysis wrong. Great answer and all, but incorrect analysis.

He counts the used car as requiring no energy to manufacture, and he counts it as lasting as long as a new car.

So, what he shows is that the Prius, with the energy cost of production included, takes less energy, lifetime, than the Corolla, without the energy cost of production included. That shows how efficient the Prius is, but its still the wrong calculation.

Wouldn't bring it up, but that style of calculation is exactly what drives the whole used-car-is-greener myth. Every analysis of that you see effectively assumes that we have an infinite supply of used cars that were produced with no energy cost. In effect, they conclude that the environmentally correct thing is for everyone always to buy a used car ... which if you think about it for even a second, is clearly nonsense.

The only calculation that makes sense is the one that pro-rates the energy cost of production over the life of the vehicle. Otherwise, if you buy a car, drive it for 60 seconds, then sell it, you count the original owner as having consumed the entire energy cost of the vehicle in 60 seconds, while all subsequent owners consume none of the original energy cost.

Similarly, when you buy a 10-year-old car, you aren't buying the same number of years of expected service life as you do when you buy a new car.

I've done what I think is the right analysis in threads here before, and, within reason, I end up where Fred_H is. As long as you are improving the fleet mileage, you're coming ahead. There are a few minor caveats. One is that you don't induce people to drive more by making better cars available to them cheaper. The other is that you don't flood the market with so many new cars that you end up scrapping cars vastly earlier in their life-cycle, so that you "churn" the car fleet fast enough that the increased manufacturing cost overwhelms the savings in fuel costs. The first caveat might be possible, the second one, I've never seen evidence that we are anywhere near that.

I'll add one more caveat: that the supply of used cars is not increasing the pool.