cars
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Of Motion and Emotion
I seem to have touched a nerve: it seems that more people had an opinion about my posts on the Cascadia Scorecard weblog discussing the Prius and the potential benefits of hybrid SUVs than about anything I'd written before.
My question is: why?
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Hm.
Over the last two days, a question has circulated around the NEW office, asked by green architect and NEW friend Rob Harrison. His quandary: Which car should he buy to replace an automobile that was totalled?
He's narrowed his choices to four -- a super-efficient Toyota Prius, a VW or Subaru station wagon, or a 1992 Honda Accord -- and is weighing factors including price, reliability, safety, utility, and environmental performance.
I can't claim any special expertise on the subject, but I can say this much (and I'm preparing to duck when people start throwing blunt objects at me): For most city dwellers, buying a new Prius is a fairly expensive way of reducing your environmental impacts.
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Italy jumps on the SUV-bashing bandwagon
Europeans don't take as kindly to mobile global-warmers as do their American counterparts. Latest country to join in the anti-SUV backlash: Italy. The nation's Environment Ministry is plotting to slap a new tax on big gas-guzzlers, and possibly use the funds to incentivize people to scrap old cars and buy more efficient ones, Reuters reports.
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Umbra on whether to leave the engine running
Dear Umbra, I have a question that has been nagging me for a while, and I would really like to have it answered once and for all. You see, I deliver pizzas for a living right now, and so I make many frequent stops and starts at people’s houses during a shift. I always turn […]
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Schwarzenegger’s “Green Hummer” plan sparks cultish following
Does this look green to you? The Hummer has come to be associated with a number of things — steroid-addled egomaniacs, over-compensating suburban dads, the highway to global-warming hell, even Monica Lewinsky’s antics in the Oval Office … But eco-friendly driving isn’t one of them. Unless, of course, you travel in the “Green Hummer” underground, […]
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Umbra on SUVs
Dear Umbra, Please help; my friend Kathryn Schulz, Grist’s managing editor, is sick of hearing about my guilt. I own an SUV. In my defense, I got it almost six years ago, when I was moving to the mountains and needed a big car with four-wheel drive to support my rugged, transient lifestyle, and it’s […]
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Bush plan to overhaul CAFE standards is a mixed bag
Clean up the bus, gus. Photo: NREL. The Bush administration has taken to singing the clean-car gospel lately, but it’s not quite hitting all the notes. Last month, U.S. EPA chief Mike Leavitt joined Detroit kingpins in a splashy D.C. conference to trumpet the arrival of new vehicles and fuels that reduce sulfur emissions — […]
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The word on relatively green cars and positively green bicycles
Hy-wire act. Photo: DOE. My daughter Maya, who is 9, saw a picture of the General Motors Hy-wire, the company’s super-sleek experimental fuel-cell car, and immediately decided we should have one. Unfortunately, I had to explain to her that the hydrogen-powered, zero-emission, fossil-fuel-free car would be perfect for us in all respects except one: It’s […]
