Toyota's drive to reduce emissions
Sunday March 15 2009
My comments last week regarding the polluting effects involved in making the batteries for hybrid cars provoked a colourful response from Toyota, who sent me a very informative storyboard on the issue.
With the current Toyota Prius they looked at a vehicle's whole life cycle, how it's made, driven and disposed of.
Based on 10 years' use and driving 150,000km, the Prius achieves a 43 per cent reduction in the amount of CO2 emissions during its life when compared to a petrol engine vehicle of a similar size.
Although it is accepted that there are more emissions used in the initial manufacture of the vehicle and, in particular, its battery, after about 11,000km of driving, the life cycle CO2 becomes less than that for a similar petrol vehicle. It passes out diesel at 35,000km.
Toyota add that, given the improvements within the production process at the Tsutsumi plant in Japan where Prius is produced, it is quite possible that these figures have improved since this report was first produced.
- Campbell Spray
