How can a car that sells so well, hold up so well, be so hated?
Chuck Thomas -
CleanMPG - Oct. 27, 2009
Top Gear's episode that literally shot up the Prius.
In 1996, Toyota and Honda were terrified they had no answer for the EV1. They thought it would be marketed as seriously as the Chevy Volt a full fifteen years later. Not wanting to let California's Zero Emissions law remove them from their market and maybe the entire US, Toyota developed the Prius - Honda the Insight. Neither were EVs - they wanted to have an offering to satisfy CARB. Toyota is infamous for reliable, yet bland vehicles. The shape of the Prius was largely dictated by wind tunnel results. Interestingly, the Prius would eventually
look a lot like the Honda CRX after originally resembling the Echo. Toyota so far has not acknowledged accusations of Steven Spielberg or Leonardo DiCaprio as consultants for the Prius design.
This week, Consumer Reports declared the Prius the
most dependable family car sold in America, followed by the Ford Fusion which has a hybrid version. So far, no response from Art Spinella, who's executive summary is the Dust to Dust study
claiming among other things the Prius durable for only 100,000 miles while the soon to be discontinued H2 Hummer rolls for a stratospheric 300,000 miles. Well before the CR report, a
taxi driver in Vancouver drives two Prius well over 200,000 miles apiece.
Automotive history is replete with lemons such as the Chevy Vega and Ford Pinto, so how can the Prius be included in that list when it's most of the
two million hybrids Toyota has sold? People are gullible, but two million? Fooling customers is one thing but why is Nissan licensing Toyota's HSD technology while Ford and Volvo use nearly identical hybrid technology? At most, a few hundred hybrid battery packs have gone bad.
General Motors' US market share from the EV1 intro in 1996 to 2009 has dipped from 31% to 15% while dismissing the hybrid as Toyota's Billion-dollar PR campaign....GM's post-bankruptcy survival is far from assured. While not to be completely discounted, isn't it interesting that people
concerned with EMF radiation from hybrids are blogging about it from a
monitor?
Far less honest than electromagnetic radiation concerns is the
falsehood Sudbury has become a toxic dump as bad as Love Canal or Cherynobyl because their nickel mine focused on hybrid batteries when Toyota is 0.4% of their business. And now hybrids are a
menace to the blind, yet many conventional gasoline cars are nearly as silent.
Do you get the impression some just have a loathing for hybrids, esp. the Prius? For all the diatribe on forums and talk radio only leftists drive the Prius, it's hard to pass off
R. James Woolsey, Jr., Senators Lamar Alexander, Bill Frist, Richard Lugar as socialists. Over a year ago, someone tried to start a forum that would be the
FUH2 for the Prius. After only 100 posts, it was converted to a blog, but no updates since last April and worse website mileage than a Hummer in quicksand.
Does it seem like many of the hybrid objections are reminiscent of grade school boys hating for no particular reason with a low emotional quotient?
Ironically, these haters might stop driving and go zero impact if the only wheels on the road were the Prius.
- Dale
Linear Mode
