I can't be the only one visiting this site outside of North America. Any chance of letting RSS readers know to which market your entries refer?

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Hi ThwartedEfforts. I'm only another reader but I would have to respond that unless otherwise noted, these articles relate to the United States.

I don't know where you are, but when I was in the UK last year, I only saw about four new Prius cars in
2 1/2 weeks. I was very surprised, given the price of "petrol" in the UK compared to the US (about 3 times as expensive), and considering that the only 1/2 hour of "telly" I watched in the UK was a news show wherein the BBC newsman spoke about how diesel smoke from cars, lorries and busses were endangering the health of the British citizenry.

The Prius is some 10 times CLEANER than is required for sale in California, thus perhaps emitting 1/20th of the air pollution of a conventional diesel C-or-D class auto as sold in Europe or the UK.

Plus my 2005 Prius can obtain over 80 MPG (Imperial gallon / over 65 MPG US gallon) at 45-50 mph on the straight and level, in fact I have seen consident 50 mpg (US) (69 mpg Imperial) at 70 mph (112 km/hr).

This is a car with a D-class sized interior (I've had a 27" high-def TV in the box, in my car) with seating for 5 and a decent sized trunk (or boot).

I personally think the Euros and Brits are madder than hatters to NOT embrace the Prius, but that's just me.

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Hi there.

First off, hybrid sales in the US are tailing off. What you see on the roads isn't necessarily a reflection of reality:

http://tinyurl.com/y6v55g
====Total hybrid sales fell 2.7 per cent to 79,640 in the US during the first six months, according to CNW Market Research.
...
Only seven out of a thousand people who look at a hybrid on dealers' forecourts in the United States actually buy one.====

Hybrids represent less than 1% of all auto sales in the US; with the US being the world's biggest polluter by some margin, the effects of them are negligible.

As for the UK and Europe, this from BusinessWeek:

http://tinyurl.com/y5qk2a
====The 2.2CTDi diesel-powered Honda Civic, sold now in Britain, delivers 43 miles per gallon in town and 55.4 mpg in combined city-highway driving. The hybrid Civic manages only 50 mpg in combined driving, while a gas Civic averages 33 mpg. "We're leading the way to cleaner diesel engines," says Honda Chief Executive Takeo Fukui.====

You may note from the BusinessWeek article that Honda's diesel engines meet California's silly NOx standards (I say 'silly' because I am among the many doubters who think the restrictions placed upon certain pollutants will have no lasting effect).

When it comes to cars, Europe is more environmentally aware than North America. Our fuel costs are massive so we have to be. Almost half of all new cars sold here are economical diesels and small bio-diesels. What America needs to 'go green' is not a few thousand people driving about in stopgap technology like the Prius (and certainly not in colossal V8s, which is the norm), but clean diesels.

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"Nine of the bottom ten, says CR, are domestic brands. The numbers are calculated based on the difference between the MSRP of a 2004 model and its current value."

If the domestics give discounts across the board like $X cash back then of course using MSRP is going to make them look like huge depreciation. If new they are selling for $2500 cash back throughout the nation then of course they will be worth a lot less than MSRP. But of course CR likes to roll that way. Not mention the Toyota recalls but make the domestics look bad.

Someone can't count either. Out of the bottom 10:
Ford,Ford,Buick,Lincoln,Dodge,Mercury,GMC,Ford,Buick,Chrysler how could 9 be Domestic? Think about it. If you are a dumbass and don't realize that Chrysler products are not "domestic" anymore then the number is 10 of 10 but if you aren't a dumbass then the number is 8 of 10 (there are two Chrysler Group products on the list), right?

They surely didn't mean 9 of 10 domestic assembled because that would be 7 (or less counting multiple factory assembly) since the Crown Vic, Grand Marq and Rendezvous are not assembled in the U.S.

If they can't count 10 items in front of them how in the hell are they going to tell you something a little more complicated like resale value based on thousands of vehicles sold?

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Alternative fuels for an automobile are certainly becoming increasingly important as time goes on. Eventually, we are bound to run out of fossil fuel on this planet, as there is a finite amount to pump from underground. Additionally, the rate at which we use it up will be increasing, especially since China is just beginning its rapid expansion in the use of cars. Also, the way things have been going in recent years, the carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuel, fuel that has been buried for millions of years underground, is causing “the greenhouse effect” to be of major concern because of the global warming it causes. Clearly, the polar ice caps are melting at an increasingly alarming rate, and not as much of the water is re-freezing in the “winter months” (depending on the pole). If we don’t do something about it soon, like within about 20 years, we will find our cities on the coasts buried under water. Also, as I understand it, the warming of the oceans will cause quite dramatic shifts in weather patterns, meaning more hurricanes and stormy weather. I’m not writing this for the purpose of extolling gloom and doom, but rather to point out that we human beings in the near future need to be altering our ways of burning such large amounts of fossil fuel. We need to ramp-up the development of new technology and methods to power our cars and to be less reliant on cars in general. Of course public transportation helps, but we need to develop the technology and efficiency of using alternative sources of energy soon. In my opinion, ethanol is an important component of the bridge needed to get us to the use of hydrogen cells, and beyond, to power our vehicles. The beauty of burning ethanol, being that it comes from the fermentation of vegetative sources such as corn, wood pulp, and many other plant sources, in effect recycles the carbon dioxide present in our atmosphere. Plants use it to grow in the process of photosynthesis. Brazil uses almost exclusively ethanol that is derived from sugarcane grown there.

Here in the U.S. and elsewhere, the auto makers are producing more and more cars that will run on “E85” fuel, composed of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. Gasohol (10% ethanol) has been a good start, but E85 is even better in my opinion. Vehicles that will run on either gasoline or E85 are called “flex-fuel vehicles” (FFVs). In the latest issue of the leading consumer magazine is a front-page article about what they deem, “the ethanol myth”. They came to the conclusion that it is disadvantageous to run a FFV vehicle on E85 fuel instead of gasoline. Both the fuel economy and acceleration of the 2007 SUV tested dropped when running on E85 compared with gasoline.

From this, it seems apparent to me that the U.S. needs to catch up to Sweden, General Motor's Saab in particular. Running on E85, the Saab 9-5 "BioPower" Turbo model delivers a significant 20 percent increase in maximum power and 16 percent more torque while emitting 80% less CO2 into the environment compared to running it on gasoline. Running E85 compared to gasoline takes about a second off the 0-60 mph time, and there is a 15 percent gain in fuel economy on the open road where fuel-enrichment for engine cooling is no longer necessary when a vehicle is run on ethanol. The 9-5 BioPower has taken the Swedish market by storm this year, outselling its full-year 2006 sales target in just four months. Sweden has a long cultural and political tradition of respect for the environment, and this is reflected in Saab's achievements of the pioneering of asbestos-free brake linings and the removal of CFCs from air conditioning systems, and now Saab’s Trionic 7 BioPower engines. I remember back in 1973, when the oil embargo hit and additional "smog control" devices (i.e., the EGR valve and air pump) were required on new cars, their performance declined significantly. Many people at the time, including mechanics and engineers, thought the performance and efficiency of cars had been dealt a lethal blow. This is when I bought my first Saab, a 99 EMS. Saab, with the development of the "lambda sond" oxygen sensor (keeps the correct stoichiometric ratio of 14.5 to 1 in the air-fuel mixture) in 1976 along with electronic fuel injection, required no such smog control devices. It was the beginning of electronics-to-the-rescue for car performance. This technology, along with concern for safety and functionality, enamored me with the cars. I was impressed that they did this because they wanted to, as opposed to doing it because they had to. Seemingly at odds with one another, performance and fuel economy were blended together in a practical and distinctive car.

So here we are, forty years later, and Saab is still leading the way in emissions and performance technology. All Saabs are turbocharged and have direct ignition, and the engine’s combustion process is very precisely controlled by a powerful 32-bit microprocessor controlled system called, "Trionic 7". This unit monitors the combustion process in each cylinder a million times per second for optimum efficiency. It precisely regulates the fuel-air mixture in each cylinder, the ignition timing, and the amount of turbo boost pressure allowed. And(!), very significantly, it automatically adjusts itself to any proportion of gasoline and ethanol.

How does Saab achieve higher performance using E85 compared to gasoline, you might ask? It stems from the octane rating of E85 being about 10% higher than that of gasoline. The Trionic system thus allows more advanced ignition timing, a higher compression ratio, and a higher turbo boost pressure, all of which increase the performance and efficiency of the engine.

There are two driving forces behind the adoption of a renewable and sustainable fuel such as “bioethanol” E85: The environmental need to combat climate change from the greenhouse effect and the strategic need to overcome dependency on oil, a finite resource for which global demand will exceed supply, not to mention the world tensions related to it’s procurement. Sweden plans on being free of dependency on oil by the year 2020. Let's hope that the same will be true of the U.S. It appears to me that General Motors, especially with Saab’s traditional engine know-how, is leading the way.

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Hey, ThwartedEffort:

Total autosales were down approximately the same amount as hybrid sales, so your statistic doesn't show quite what you suggest.

Also, although hybrid sales are still a tiny percentage of the market, they have grown enormously over the last several years both in number of offerings and total sales. So again, this statistic is misleading.

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The Euro person's comment about Euros being more environmentally friendly because they use diesel has a limited amount of merit to it.
The drawback of course, is that with oil price rises to come (peak oil on the horizon) even the price of diesel will go through the roof.
Not to mention that diesel is STILL OIL!!!
There's no way to produce enough biodiesel to meet all our needs without competing massively for food and/or destroying what little we have left of the world's forests.

Realistically the only option we have for a somewhat comfortable lifestyle going forward is some form of hybrid. Whether it's hybrid diesel or hybrid gasoline is irrelevant. We need a stopgap measure right now because the battery technology simply isn't up to it to give us a zero emissions replacement vehicle for internal combustion engines.

Plug in hybrids are our only feasible technical solution.

That and bicycles.

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