Go Green Going Home

Among my eclectic collection of interests is one that I'm rather embarrassed about, and one that surprises people around me. I love cars. I used to be able to look at a car and go "it's a car." Now, I look at a car, and I can typically identify the make if not the model. It's rather strange to see something drive past and go "Hey, a Porsche Boxter roadster - don't see those around much!"

Now, here's a car that's billed as the greenest machine since ... well, since ever. It's the Toyota Prius.

Note that the car is actually towing the sun through the sky, and that the scenery is made up entirely of happy dancers and gymnasts waving their arms in the wonderful breeze or doing backflips and happy, care-free tumbles down the waterfall. Note that the sun is also made of happy dancers languidly waving their arms.

The Toyota Prius is a hybrid car. It has an electric battery as well as a gasoline-powered engine. The engine can be used to drive the car, or it can recharge the batteries so that you don't run out of juice after five minutes of driving. The Prius is widely regarded as the savior of the planet because it is just so very, very green, and people are falling over themselves to drive them. This blog post is going to stray forward a bit, because what I know about cars largely comes from television, and television loves celebrities. However, mostly it's about peer pressure.

Most major celebrities drive a Prius. They kind of have to; when you go on talk shows and whatnot, and the host says "Now, you drive a Hummer, don't you?" the PR fallout is going to be terrible. After all, saving the planet is very trendy right now. So celebrities get the Prius (and keep the Hummer, or the Jeep, or the Lamborghini) so that they can say "I have a Prius" and soak in the applause. Then, because all sorts of celebrities drive them, millions of people jump on the bandwagon.

It's especially interesting when you consider that the Prius isn't all it's cracked up to be. The engine is, yes, very clever; it's electric at low speeds (such as in town) and gas at higher speeds (such as on a highway). So in the city, it has extremely good gas mileage; however, as with every car, the faster you drive the lower its efficiency. Its top speed is quite low, approximately 110mph, and while that's 45mph faster than is legal here in Illinois, it's also indicative of low power (actually, 80 horsepower new) which is rather worrying if, for example, you want to speed up quickly to avoid the semi truck bearing down on you in your tiny, trendy hybrid.

But that's not the best part. The best part is, you can match or beat the Prius's mileage in many cars of a similar price range, even if the competitor car isn't a hybrid. What?! You can drive a BMW with better mileage than a Prius?! Yes, you can. It's been proven. The Prius is not greener than a BMW. And that's not even touching on the way they manufacture the hybrids, which does considerably more damage to the environment than actually driving the car ever will.

So. Why, then, do people flock to buy the Prius? It's gotta be peer pressure. It's not a good car and it's expensive, at $30,000 for the newest standard model. That's not including the options, which can easily build up to thousands of dollars. It's gotta be peer pressure, really. Going green is such a huge movement that an advertisement only needs to suggest that this car is in some way verdant, and suddenly you're killing the planet if you buy anything else. After all, you don't want to make all those happy gymnasts and dancers unhappy, do you? You don't want to make it so that the darling Prius can't tow the sun through the sky anymore, do you? You want to go green, don't you? Don't you?

You're not a planet-killer, right? Right?