Originally Posted by dunketh

The reason folk dont already use alternative vehicles is the high initial purchase price!
If I could buy a leccy car for cheap then I'd already have one!

Given that the most I've ever spent on a car is around £1000 I cant see it ever being a viable alternative.
For the moment I stick to 'bangernomics', which is actually the most environmentally sound option of the lot!

Theres a very good article that compares driving a Morris Minor to driving a new Prius. Taking into account the amount of remanufacturing thats gone on and the amount of carbon expended just to make the prius the Minor comes out top. Its never been 'recycled' and has had virtually no environmental impact since its creation 40 years ago.
My current escort is the same, on a lesser scale. In the 18 years its been on the road, the only impact its had is emissions.

Buying a 'new' car is simply not environmentally sound, it makes no logical sense when you look at the life of its component parts. As for electric cars - what do we do with the moutain of dud batteries that are an inevitable by-product in 5-10 years?

Originally Posted by Mitsy FQ

how would the prius compare if you used 40 years of use in your calculation

Originally Posted by foreigneRS

i know that jim and know that you are not so stupid to think that, but some people are

there are 'clean' ways to generate electricity, they just need the investment to become large scale. nuclear fusion is the way forward

Originally Posted by Chip-3Door

Do you expect those batteries to last for 40 years?

Have you seen the replacement costs?

Originally Posted by Mike Rainbird

I personally think that bio-ethanol will be the future of ic engines .

Originally Posted by Mitsy FQ

we already have the solar power age, grants to stick them on your roof ,20 years to brake even ,panel life 20 years don't see that as viable lol

Originally Posted by foreigneRS

that's not on a large scale though, with the economy of scale that goes with it and future developments in technology.

also, there are other ways of using solar power. there's that place that uses loads of mirrors to focus a beam up the top of a tower

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower

Originally Posted by dunketh

I think the older car would still win in the end.
Just think of the amount of times the steel used in a new prius has been recycled throughout its lifetime
Time and time again the steel's been through an arc furnace, which obviously uses a hell of a lot of electricity, the interior plastics have been made a new - plastic being oil based, and all the other stuff included in manufacture.

Thats not including the environmental cost of providing the power to run the thing on a daily basis, then theres the chemicals in the batteries.. etc..etc..

The Minor is an extreme case but it proves the point. I think we should address wasteage before we address problems with manufacture and consumption.

To be honest I think the first thing we should do is replace all fossil-fuel power stations with nuclear ones. Nuclear energy being truly clean afaik.
Fair enough you have nuclear waste to deal with but we're only talking small quantities that. for the sake of argument, could be regularly blasted out to space.

Originally Posted by dan le moignan

Agree! I work in the oil/ petrochemical industry for exxon mobil, they are developing kit that can now drill far deeper than we have been able to before. Which will release yet more crude!.