natural gas power, all of which don't create any polution.
Can you try thinking about that one more time?
I am a big car fanatic, I know for a fact the facts they stated on the Prius ARE TRUE. I am a subscriber to 5 different car magazines, popular machanics and popular science. I have read numerous articles in various magazines that Prius' are the ****tiest car to buy if your concerned about the envirement because of the polution that is involved in creating the batteries.
Perhaps you could provide some of this evidence to the rest of us. I have to say I'm rather dubious about the credibility of those magazines.
I did a quick Wiki search and found this little gem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNW_Marketing_ResearchNever thought I'd live to see the day when a company logo was a blatant use of WordArt. I also found
this article that talks about it.
The article in question by CNW Technologies is roughly 458 pages long. However, a lot of that appears to simply be tables of numbers. What did catch my eye when I started looking it over was this:
Over time and after on and off again discussions, as well as extensive Internet searches of available studies on this issue, it was discovered that many had tried, none had succeeded in measuring TOTAL energy consumption for the auto industry.
The evidence they present here doesn't support the conclusion. It's entirely possible that such a study was done, and completed successfully, but it wasn't available online. But in addition, their focus on "TOTAL" energy consumption also concerns me. Taken literally, it's impossible to determine such a figure with 100% accuracy. You can approximate but there's going to be a lot of different ways you can approximate, things you can include, etc.
But from a basic marketing POV, this makes sense. "There's a problem, and we have a solution!"
In many cases the jargon was overly technical and aimed at scientists and engineers.
Woah. Isn't that the point? Who do you think builds cars? Who are the people who most understand the issues at stake here?
Furthermore, the last paragraph had stated that nobody had succeeded at doing this. Why talk about jargon, then? All this seems to be is an attack on the style of writing for other reports that has nothing to do with whether the study was comprehensive or not. Indeed, I would expect a comprehensive study to require extensive knowledge of the processes in question in order to be able to fully understand the report - the kind of knowledge that a scientist or engineer would possess.
Government agencies are offering significant incentives for consumers to buy hybrids as are manufacturers. Is this misguided? Perhaps. We make no conclusion about such good intentions. Our goal, again, is simply to look at what society has to pay for the energy needed to support various vehicles.
At this point I'm getting kind of skeptical about the way this thing is written. From what they claim to be doing, they should be able to state with some confidence whether government subsidies towards hybrids actually are resulting in more environmentally-friendly measure.
Furthermore, they're putting all of this talk, all of this focus on hybrids, before they really start talking about the methods used. Even before you read the document, you can tell that they're putting an intense focus on hybrid cars.
Example: If the consumer lives in the Los Angeles Basin, reducing smog and contending with some of the country's highest fuel costs make a hybrid a solid and logical vehicle choice. What consumers need to know, however, is that the LA Basin and the Los Angelino's wallet might benefit, the energy demands and pollution are exported somewhere else – either to the country of manufacture or to the states where the eventual vehicle will be disposed through recycling or scrap.
"Los Angelino's wallet". 'k.... I think there's a "while" missing in there between the "that" and the "the", and "Los Angelino" is supposed to be...I dunno, Los Angeles? That doesn't make much sense, either. "The Los Angelos' wallet"? Is this some kind of slang for white people? Oh well.
I find it interesting that they're not willing to evaluate the effectiveness of government actions, but they are willing to speak with absolute certainty to consumers. If you buy a Prius, it
will be just as or more environmentally costly, and the cost will be exported to somewhere else. There's no kind of conditional qualifiers on that sentence. (What if you were thinking of buying a Maybach, or it's a used vs new decision?)
This is a general-consumer report, not a technical document per se. It includes breakdowns of each vehicle's total energy requirements from Dust to Dust but does not include issues of gigajuelles, kW hours or other unfriendly (to consumers) terms. Perhaps, in time, we will release our data in such technical terms. First, however, we will only look at the energy consumption cost.
What's a juelle? Is that like some kind of German version of "joule"? And why would kilowatt-hours be unfriendly to consumers - what exactly do people see on their electric bills these days? Horsepower-seconds?
Furthermore, there's nothing stopping them from sticking them in an appendix or separate file, although that would make the document even longer than it is now. Speaking of which, how is a 458-page document consumer friendly?
The information contained is as accurate as we can make it currently although we believe it has an error margin somewhere between 11 and 14 percent due to shifting production plans and new technologies being implemented in the salvage industry which includes recycled, non-recyclable and re-used vehicle components. Over time, we hope to be able to reduce that error margin as data becomes more easily available. There are some disclaimers and caveats which you can find in the Appendix section.
This isn't stated in any kind of statistical manner that I'm familiar with. Exactly how certain is "We believe". Is that a "We're pretty sure" kind of "We believe", or is that a "These numbers just make intuitive sense" kind of we believe?
So I decided to take a look at the appendices, and I didn't see any kind of disclaimers and caveats. I did notice that they had about 56 appendices, none of which were given a title, and all of which appeared to be random hybrid-related news postings from the internet. (Perhaps that is the result of all their extensive internet searching) Note that
Appendix UU consists entirely of comics. (pg 439-443) How much do you want to bet that they didn't bother to secure a copyright before including them in their document?
I could search more, but given that they can't take the time to even name their appendices so you can find data in any kind of meaningful way from the table of contents, and given that they apparently didn't take the time to run a spellchecker over their document for "gigajuelle", and given that they've basically admitted they're being as vague as possible in the document - I don't have any kind of faith in their study.
ConclusionBased on their introduction, their document format, and - I have to admit - their logo, I do not have the confidence that this company is willing to go to the time and effort required to conduct a survey of this magnitude. I feel that they are relying on the size of the document to obfuscate the document to the point at which it is hard for anybody to conclusively attack it without going to a significant amount of trouble in order to do so. Probably, given the supporting documents in their appendix section, more effort than they put into the document.
Based on their statements, and again based on their supporting evidence, it looks like the majority of their initial research and a fair amount of their research conducted during the construction of the document came from a bunch of Google searches. The fact that they can't even spell joule suggests to me that they either didn't take, or didn't pay very much attention in the science or engineering classes that would have given them an understanding of the basics required to be able to understand the manufacturing process and the technology involved in this survey.
I could read further but I think it's pretty clear from the introduction that I'm not their intended audience. I'd expect them to back their claims up with specific facts and numbers - they, on the other hand, explicitly state and imply that they are not releasing definite figures because they're too technical. There's no way to prove they're correct and there's no way to prove them wrong. Perhaps they're taking a page from Intelligent Design.
Finally, though they state that Toyota is an unreliable source, they also make it clear that a large portion of the information that they're relying on to produce their data comes from Toyota itself. Since the document seems entirely uncited with regards to what pieces of data come from what sources (I can't find any kind of citations index or citation footnotes anywhere), this puts their data on the entire Toyota line into doubt. Thus their most controversial claims are also the most uncertain ones.
EDIT: And really, that is a
horrible logo. I haven't used WordArt in years, but even I can tell in one glance that it's one of the preset WordArt templates. They didn't even bother to customize the colors or anything.
