I’ve always considered the Toyota Prius little more than a marketing con. Not that that’s Toyota’s fault, more the idiot greenies that do little more than whine endlessly and generate hot air. In the the face of their griping, it’s little wonder that the car industry will promote any development that might shut them up. That said, the Prius is so bad as a ‘green solution’ that a quick hunt around the web shows a number of analyses of its real world performance that show it to be less than green in reality, when driven ‘normally’.
Note however, that I’m not knocking the Prius, I’m kicking the hype that has been attached to it, the technology it pioneered will get better as the supporting hardware develops, but I don’t think the poor car will ever recover from having been adopted by every overpaid American film star that wants to be photographed in one, to prove that they have ‘green credentials’, and will forget that they spew tonnes of CO2 as they jet around the world needlessly in their private planes.
As luxury car manufacturers, and therefore deadly enemy of the greenies, Mercedes may be spared the film star credibility treatment, however they have advanced the hybrid car concept by upgrading the technology to provide measurable improvement over the same car in their range when powered by a conventional engine.
The S 400 BlueHYBRID is powered by a 299 horsepower engine that enables it to sprint from 0 to 100 km per hour in 7.3 seconds.
It would consume on average 7.9 litres of gasoline per 100 km and emit 190 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre, compared with 10.3 litre of gasoline and 247 grams of CO2 in a comparable conventional S-Class.
The car will be the world’s most economical luxury sedan, the company said, and the technology used is the result of 25 patents held by Daimler. Daimler said the main advantages of the newly developed lithium-ion battery were its very compact dimensions and far superior performance relative to conventional nickel-metal hybrid batteries such as those powering the Toyota Prius.
Expect to see the greenies rubbishing the technology, and playing the same old record of “WALK”.
The Apollonian Gasket 