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 Monday 8th February 2010
Prius recall: What will environmentalists put in their driveways?Some people will have been surprised to learn that the braking problem Toyota has identified in the Prius has only caused two accidents, neither of them fatal. Not me. No one who actually owns one of these hybrids ever takes it for a spin. It’s a “show car”, a vehicle people park prominently outside their homes in order to advertise how environmentally conscious they are before hopping into the SUV they’ve got parked out back to pick up the kids from school. I discovered this when I was living in Los Angeles in 2004. I was interviewing a supermodel for a glossy magazine and when I showed up at her house I noticed a black, supercharged, S-type Jaguar sitting in the driveway. “Nice wheels,” I said when she opened the door. “Oh no,” she protested. “That belongs to my maid.” She then pointed to a white Toyota parked alongside it. “I drive a Prius.” (To read more, click here.)
Comments page 1 of 1 - 4 post(s) Re: Prius recall: What will environmentalists put in their driveways? Posted by Kieran Mahon on 08-02-2010 14:02: chortle chortle.... what a funny guy you are... Re: Prius recall: What will environmentalists put in their driveways? Posted by Bedd Gelert on 08-02-2010 23:33: A slightly serious point, put across in a glib way. You know how Starbucks invest a lot of money in having funky sandwiches and biscuits in their coffee shops, to give 'the illusion of quality', so that the perception of the taste of their coffee will be improved ?? Well, I guess it shows how we attach far too much importance to 'background' and not enough to the product. For years, having read 'How to lose friends and alienate people' I thought, "Well, it is not his fault if he is a bit of an arse / wanker / other word [delete to taste], he is the son of Lord Young.." What I never realised is that you are not, so far as I know, the son of Lord Young of Graffham, nor of Lord Young of Norwood Green come to that. So you are not a nasty Tory after all ! You are one of us ! A working class Labourite after all ! Welcome home. I may even need to re-think your education proposals after all. This is kind of a roundabout way of bringing up what I think of as the 'Toyota Prius' fallacy. Of course a Prius is 'environmentally friendly' if one has traded in a Dodge SUV to buy one. But if you were riding a bike beforehand, well it is not. One needs to know the background if one is to judge the foreground. And the Prius is, rather like Starbucks, about creating a perception. Not necessarily a bad thing, but one has to see the bigger picture. Re: Prius recall: What will environmentalists put in their driveways? Posted by Toby Young on 09-02-2010 11:43: Bedd, My father was Lord Young of Dartington, a Labour peer who defected to the SDP, then switched back to Labour. I like to think my school proposals are politically neutral, but they are often perceived as Tory because the Tories have promised to make the lives of parents trying to set up schools a bit easier. I think producing a Prius involves burning a lot of carbon; it's running it that involves less. But you'd need to run it for a very long time to offset its production footprint, a point often made by AGW sceptics. Consequently, the overall carbon footprint of the Dodge driver would, over the short term at least, be smaller than the carbon footprint of the Dodge driver who traded in his Dodge for a Prius. --Toby Re: Prius recall: What will environmentalists put in their driveways? Posted by Mousquetaire on 11-02-2010 01:32: Bedd: Why not judge his education proposals independently of his (rumoured) allegiances or who his father was? Toby: Seems you're not so openly anti-environmentalist as when you wrote that NOTW article some time ago. |
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