Great article on Hybrids and the Prius is singled out!!!

Congratulations are in order to all Prius owners. According to this article, gas electric Hybrids in general and the Prius in particulary have totally changed the automotive industry.

I particularly like this quote:
"One thing, though, seems to have changed the tenor of the otherwise polite hydrogen effort: Toyota's success with the Prius.

That car's unexpected popularity helped influence public policy, with the federal government offering tax breaks to hybrid buyers and state governments offering express-lane exemptions. The Prius gave Toyota a "halo" of technological virtue, said Lindsay Brooke of the auto consulting firm CSM Worldwide Inc. Now other companies want a piece of the action." "


Here's the entire article:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6803788/

GM and other companies are still likely going to try their damnest to steer this change into Hydrogen that is made from fossil fuels, which I think is a dead end. But it may just happen that Prius owners have now helped put Toyota so far out front that future research may just end up actually helping consumers. Wouldn't that be novel.

 

I'm sorry, but in the river near my house, you can go fishing now. So thank you environmentalists.

And when I was in high school, I remember visiting NYC and blowing my nose and my kleenex was filled with black stuff. I went there recently and the air is tons cleaner. So thank you environmentalists.

And I hear the bald eagle is thriving again. So thank you environmentalists.

So I take exception to the "rabid environmentalists" because they are why you can fish and breath when you barely could 25 years ago.

And I also take exception to your suggestion that lunatic environmentalists somehow "favored" coal over nuclear. Many were and are against nuclear, but they are hardly pro coal.

As for nuclear, I agree that this may be a good source for energy, but I also think that had our society gone down the solar/wind/tide & mass transit route more forcefully over the last 50 years, we would not be in our current mess.

The Prius probably gets 30 to 60% better use out of gasoline when compared to other cars. Can you imagine where we would be if we started down this "Prius led" path 30 years ago? Can you imagine if every vehicle on the road in 2005 had near zero emissions and 25% better fuel economy, never mind that if this research had taken off 30 years ago, we would probably be up to 100% better mileage today.

It looks from this MSNBC article above that this planet is finally going down that road that we should have started down 30 years ago. Better late than never. And it just might be that the "rabid environmentalists" that bought Prii helped make this happen. So thank you again environmentalists.

 

And the storage issues.

However, I would go on to say that I'd prefer the waste storage system of nuclear over the waste storage of coal.

The first could be in a cavern that we can manage, if we have a mind to. The second one is in the air that I breathe.

But nuclear is not the point of this thread. I was hoping people would find this MSNBC article interesting. I also think this article suggests that something truly might be happening in the auto industry. And anyone who bought a hybrid in the last 7 years helped contribute to it.

And anyone who bought a Prius in the last 7 years made an even bigger contribution. There is power in market forces and we wield that power.