Is a car "greener" if it isn't durable?

sorry to hear it. i think you answered your own question. with the quest for mpg and safety, i doubt anyone has given it a thought.
that being said, i don't know exactly what your son did, but i know what my children did, and what i did as a younger man.
i wouldn't immediately jump to the conclusion that cars aren't durable, but the older and less valuable they are, the easier it is for the same accident to cause a total vs a repair.

it's all economics at that point. you could fix your car if you were really concerned about the environment, but most of us are unwilling to pay any more than the insurance company is.

all the best finding a new one!

 

Inevitably it will- if you keep the car going long enough it will eventually be worth less than any professional repair attempt. Sure, there’s exceptions for a few cars that appreciate into classics but that isn’t common.

Also consider that in a progressive emissions control regulatory scheme, the new car is likely to cause less harm in operation than the car it replaced.

 

The damage to your Prius wasn't because weight reduction, it was because the real, structural bumper doesn't extend all the way to the corners.

Not a Prius, but that is pretty much how all car bumpers are. Though it may be changing with the IIHS small overlap crash test now being a thing.

I don't know if we can say weight savings will result in a less durable car. Boron steel is seeing more use for weight cutting; it is also known as high strength steel. Then a lot of weight cutting is in non-structural components; the switch to electric parking brakes is driven mostly be weight and cost savings.

The lighter weight materials do increase repair costs, as body shops need to invest in new equipment and training in addition to materials. Then there are airbags everywhere it seems. If a minor accident manages to trigger them, their replacement cost might be enough to total a car. Now cars are coming with sensors for the advanced driving aids, and some are placed easily hit locations. Just recalibrating them can make a simple repair like a windshield replacement a chore.

Adding more high value components to car, whether for fuel economy, safety, or convenience, makes it easier for repair costs to reach that total threshold.

Finally, car manufacturers used to make cars that could survive a crash. It resulted in more serious injuries and deaths. We sacrifice the car to reduce those now. That is balanced by cars that stay out of crashes having a longer service life than those in the past.

 

Sorry to hear about the accident. Good thing you had full coverage for an older car. My son managed to total my old HCH twice! LOL As for your assertion of Prius being totaled by just a low-speed accident, I think the situation is the same for any car, fuel-efficient or not. The insurance company calls the car totaled because the repair cost is close enough to the value of the car. If you really want to be greener both ecology and economy, you could buy back the car from the insurance company and fixed it cheap. You save money, you save fuel. That's what I did with my HCH after my kid totaled it the first time. And you may even let your kid total it again.

 

The car is a “complete loss” only for insurance purposes. If you accept the settlement, the damaged car will be sent to auction, where it will be bought by someone who will repair it, in the U.S. or in a country with lower costs, or who will salvage its usable parts to repair other cars and offer the remaining metal for recycling.

 

When the first mandated crash bumpers came out Consumers Reports used to consider the cost of repair after surviving the test. They no longer do that.
The insurance testing group has improved car safety and the manufacturers covet the high ratings.

That may have lowered insurance claim amounts but I believe they need to take testing to another level to reduce costs further. People are not dying but I believe more cars are being totally scrapped due to high repair costs. They need to incorporate some of those cost metrics into their ratings.

 

As the IIHS testing is for the industry to help determine insurance rates, I'm sure they factor in repair costs. They just don't publish it for the public.

 

How is the 2019 Prime with its glass jaw bumpers a top rated car then??
In a senior moment I forgot the IIHS name when posting earlier.

 

I'm guessing, but because the published ratings are about occupant safety and reducing injuries with the crash tests, and rest(headlights, autobraking, etc.) are about avoiding crashes. Bumper covers are for aesthetics and aero. They do nothing in a crash except increase repair costs, which the IIHS public ratings have no concern for. Repairing it alone would be under many peoples deductible.

It seems the fragile piece people concerned with can be purchased separately now.

FRONT BUMPER & BUMPER STAY. Toyota RAV4 | Cobb County Toyota, Kennesaw GA

 

The short answer is: Yes, it is still greener

People vastly underestimate really how bad car exhaust emissions are for us and the environment. For example, MIT estimated that ~53,000 people in the US each year die prematurely due to automobile air pollution as compared to the ~34,000 who die from accidents. Decades of SUV-marketing have made us overestimate just how "durable" and "safe" older and/or larger vehicles really are.

Also, just because according to specific economics of your situation means the car is "totaled", doesn't mean its going to end its useful life. There is a thriving used Prius market overseas in places such as Mongolia where they can handle "totaled", but repairable vehicles. Even if the car isn't repaired, broken vehicles are often the source of parts long after they reach the junkyard.

All this doesn't make your particularly situation any less bad, but it also doesn't make the current design of Prii/other hybrids not green.

 

Just a side note to update figures. That 34k number for traffic deaths is outdated. The total has actually climbed in recent years, bucking the decades-long trend.

NHTSA now shows 37k annual deaths from traffic 'accidents', really a euphemism for unintentional crashes.

The CDC now shows over 38k deaths from 'Unintentional, motor vehicle, traffic' causes. For 'All intents, motor vehicle, overall', the total is over 40k.

That MIT report was released in 2013, based on 2005 data, and its estimate had a very wide uncertainty: 90% Confidence Interval of 24,000 to 95,000. Counts of motor vehicle crash deaths are much more precise than that.

 

noonm makes me want to visit Mongolia.

 

why not, it's just a hop, skip and a jump

 

With cars that are totalled the undamaged and still usable parts get returned to the pool of parts to keep other slightly less-damaged cars running.
A bigger problem, IMHO, is all the other consumer goods that one small part breaks and the whole thing gets tossed into the trash without a second thought because it isn't worth repairing. This could be that you can't find the parts or it is too hard to find someone that knows how to repair it or the labor cost for a professional would be too much.
This is different than the other problem of all the stuff we throw away everyday that is still perfectly usable -- such as plastic utensils just because they are now "dirty"

Mike

 

agreed. and they could certainly make the parts a lot less expensive, so repair costs don't add up so quickly.

a lot of the fancy body work, glass and lighting fixtures are superfluous

 

I'm always envisioning some sort of more aerodynamic, scaled-down wrangler.

Today it's selling an image, but really: you just want to get places, comfortably and safely, and maybe transport some stuff as well.

 

Please tell me where the "landfills full of Prius batteries" are located? I have a shovel.

OPPS! Too late. Ebay already snatched them up.

Bob Wilson