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Friday, September 22, 2006

But What Will He Buy With the Proceeds?

Posted by on September 22 at 14:59 PM

How about 52 Priuses?

(Schwarzennegger sells his eight gas-guzzling Hummers; via Grist).


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um, why did he have a fleet of these in the first place?

people are such kleptos.

I love my hybrid car but miss having more space. I've heard they'll be making hybrid Hummers soon. It'll be the best of both worlds. With new technologies we'll be able to drive our cars and stop global warming at the same time.

Hmmm... So 1 guy owned 8 hummers.
Since he is only one guy, that means he would only drive 1 Hummer at a time while 7 sat in a garage. Now that he sold 8 of them, more than likely to 8 different people. That means there are technically 7 more Hummers on the road than there were before.
Way to go Arnold.

I'd recommend a Honda Civic 2007, personally. And get some with the solar fuel cell retrofit so they get 100 mpg.

i use chacos.

I certainly hope he doesn't buy Priuses. (Priusi?) It turns out that over the vehicle lifetime, a Hummer is more energy efficient than a Prius.

Over their lifetime, a Hummer's energy cost is $1.95 per mile. A Prius comes in at $3.25/mile, and the Civic Hybrid is $3.24/mile. The standard Civic was a bit better at $2.42.

http://cnwmr.com/nss-folder/automotiveenergy/

You know, a few Vespas would be good too.

The very same CMW Market Research report you quote contains quite a bit of evidence that the author is kind of full of shit. His basic premise is correct, that there are more energy factors at work than just the amount of fuel the vehicle will use over its lifetime. But, among other things, he thinks auto batteries are 100% non-recyclable, which isn't true.

I'd like to know where Mr. Spinoza gets his financing, too. My first guess is Detroit.

Spinella, not Spinoza. Sorry.

i believe those stats are misleading because hybrids had to be designed from the ground up, while hummers and most older SUVs were transplanted onto truck frames that were already being manufactured. the more vehicles are designed from a hybrid's base structure, the more those hybrids' "over the vehicle lifetime" cost will go down. meanwhile, SUVs that were built on heavy truck frames get lower gas mileage, and the more those models are built, the more the overall cost will creep up. design has already happened. deal with existing choices instead of pretending you can somehow influence the R&D phase of yesteryear.

oh, and fnarf:

"[CMW's c]lients include major automobile manufacturers, banks and lending institutions, Wall Street brokerage firms and consultants."

OK, I think Spinella is a bit of a kook. I think this research is good to do, and the nut of his analysis is correct, but I'd be more comfortable with someone who didn't endlessly parrot the same canned responses over and over to questions, and someone who didn't believe there was such a word as "gigajuelles" (repeatedly). Does he mean "gigajoules", and why does he think they are mystically complicated to understand? He frankly sounds like someone who is accustomed to snowing non-technical people with jargon. I'm not saying he IS, just that he sounds that way. I expect to read further on about his perpetual-motion machine...

Annie's point is correct, though: new technologies have unusual startup costs. But then, as a matter of actual practice, that affects energy use. The most efficient vehicles, according to this guy, are mostly "boring" cars like the Dodge Neon and Ford Escort. Which makes sense if you think about it. But there are too many holes overall, and the kooky tone makes me nervous.

Fnarf, page 237 clearly states that roughly 42% of lead-acid batteries are either recycled or refurbished. Please be a little more sure of your allegations before making them.

What exactly, though, does the automotive industry have to gain from a report that simply compares the overall value of the products they deliver? And even if the financing were suspicious, it's irrelevant if the methodology is sound.

Hell, the report even clearly states that the balance will shift given time. But the fact remains that today, it costs more energy to produce and operate a Prius than a Hummer.

It's not a "fact", it's an assertion, in a rather dubious-looking report you found on the interwebs. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. The report raises some serious questions; unfortunately some of them are about the methodology of the report itself.

The author repeatedly states that he uses "dollars per mile" because the public is too unsophisticated to uderstand gigajoelles. There's no such thing as gigajoelles, so I guess he's right about that. But I'm skeptical of the way he's doing whatever conversions he's doing. Also, there are considerations of energy cost that he's leaving out, i.e., choosing to use one material or another, or one energy form or another, for reasons having to do with who is paying those costs, you or someone else. His numbers don't add up, as one of his correspondents points out, because at one point he has virtually the entire GDP of the US going into the making, using or breaking of cars, which is nonsensical. And anyone who just includes all of his random email, including requests for more info and his frigging spam frankly looks like a kook. Even if he's right, he has no clue how to write a document.

But it's a very interesting line of research, I'll grant you that.

His research has already been thoroughly debunked months ago. Fnarf's comment about the author's unintentional claim that the entire US GDP goes into making and maintenance of cars somehow made his study the butt of many jokes just days after it was published.

It would be nice if someone who wasn't a kook would take this research and try to come up with something a little more solid, because the basic point is very sound: the energy cost and the ecological cost of a car IS in fact much more than the cost of pumping gas into it. And some of the areas of research he attempted, like trying to figure out the difference in energy cost in making things out of ordinary steel, lightweight steel, aluminum, and so on, and then breaking those apart after the car is dead, is very interesting. I hope that the reaction this piece isn't just "guy's full of shit, never mind".

Good grief, in a 458 page report he uses a misspelled word four times, and that's excessive. Stop harping on a typo and discuss the facts.

30% (Page 339) is not "virtually all". And honestly, given the US obsession with transportation, it would not surprise me to learn that something vaguely in the neighborhood of 30% of the GDP (remember that even the correspondent pointed out that this was a rough "back of the envelope" number) is ultimately spent, at some level of indirection, on vehicles.

i haven't read spinella, but i doubt he factored in the cost of CO2 emissions. carmakers and polluters need an artificial mechanism, like legislation, to impose the cost of CO2....or conscious consumers can refuse to buy heavy polluters, like hummers, and instead purchase near zero polluters, like priuses.

Lilblackcat for the win in comment #3!

Eight new Hummer owners rejoice! Somewhere, Fat Bastard @ Exxon Mobil cackles madly through his chin fat.

BC, you know nothing about the US economy. I tried to have a conversation with you, but you're not listening.

Calling the author a kook and then getting facts consistently wrong is a conversation? Funny.

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