"Green technology pollutes the planet"

[Ed Pettibone]

Ed Pettbone: ET's post raises another question for me, where the charging stations do require a fee, or if you feed a Preius at home, does that fee include sales tax and a road tax such as I pay when I buy gasoline at the pump? And as I have asked over and over, what is the cost of a new battery and how much of the old one can be recycled? BTW, I have driven my Subie 6,584 miles in four months at an overall average of 31.4 MPG.

[KeithE]

[ET]

Wow, Keith, that's quite a hit on MPG with just a tire change. Is there a big premium on low rolling resistance tires that caused you to avoid using them as replacements? Or are they hard to find? You're still getting great gas mileage, however. Or did you do an ROI and figure that the price savings made up for the drop in MPG over the life of the tires?

Ed P.....the batteries in the Prius are warrantied up to 150k miles, I believe. Initial fears that they might play out at barely more than 100k or so ended up being unfounded, but not entirely a baseless projection given rechargeable battery life in other uses.

Initial projections for replacement battery costs were as high as 7 or $8000 from what I remember...again...another miss. I am somewhat surprised that the battery cost has dropped to the below-$3000 range....be interesting to know if that includes labor to remove the old one and install the new one.

Actually, I think GM may have better luck with the new Cadillac hybrid based on the Volt than they are having with the Volt itself. Not too many folks making $170k/yr (average household income of Volt buyers) want to be seen driving a "regular people's" car like a Chevy.....the Cadillac version is better targeted to the folks that can afford to buy it. I still don't think the economics of the thing work out, but if they want to buy it, go ahead.....I do object to them - or anyone else - being giving tax credits for buying it, however.

[KeithE]

[Haruo]

My pastor drives a Prius and is pleased with it. But I don't know why, so I won't speculate.

[ET]