Re: theWatt Podcast 73

Exactly! Did you do your own life cycle assesment on the BMW? LCA's are very difficult to do but in the end, nothing else matters.

It's difficult to tell what the embodied energy of a battery is. There are many raw materials. The basic input for the NiMH battery that Toyota uses goes something like this: The NiO is mined in northern Ontario, Canada by Inco, gets shipped somewhere in Asia for refinement gets shipped to Japan, made by Panasonic EV, gets integrated into the Prius, then the Prius gets shipped to the US for resale. There's quite a lot of energy in that.

Here's a podcast: http://www.thewatt.com/node/97
It's about a life cycle energy study of cars with the conclusion that Hummers consume less energy over their lifetimes than the Prius. This is wrong because they assume a Hummer can go 300k miles and the Prius has a lifetime of 100k miles. I've found some more life-cycle studies that I'll write about soon, but they show hybrids/EV's coming out on top.

But yes, we all must think about the life cycle, not just life. I am struggling with this concept though because if nobody buys a Prius, then Toyota won't put effort into making them easier to manufacture.