Keeping what you have: the truly green cars

Cars for Clunkers brought up an old debate: whether it’s greener to swap into a new, cleaner-burning car or to keep what you have for another decade. The question has no absolute right answer; it depends largely on what you have and what you’re moving into, and how you drive. For a New York City taxi driver, giving up a Crown Victoria for a Prius is probably indeed the green choice. For the rest of us, it’s fuzzier.

Take the great IT trainer Bob O’Neill. He has been driving a 1986 Dodge Daytona for many years and 296,000 miles (though it wasn’t his primary daily driver the whole time). That car still gets 32 mpg on the highway, which is more than many new cars get. With its single fuel injector it doesn’t burn as cleanly as many new cars, but it still gets better mileage than a typical replacement car would, so the overall level of pollution is probably lower. But one has to go further than just looking at gas mileage.

I was trained in a systems approach which considers everything from before you start to after you finish. It’s the difference between the Daimler-Benz cost cutting approach used at Chrysler from 2000-2008 (order the suppliers to cut prices) and the Chrysler approach used from 1994-1999 (ask the suppliers how they can save Chrysler money by changing designs or processes, then share the proceeds.)

The systems approach, which seeks all inputs and outputs, also shows that junking a Dodge Daytona to buy a Prius is not as “green” for most people as keeping that Daytona on the road. (Note my weasel disclaimer, “for most people.” That excludes special cases — like New York City taxi drivers, whose high use and particular conditions probably make the Prius the cheapest and lowest-impact car; and junking their Crown Vics was probably quite “green” indeed, and most likely the fuel savings easily paid any expenses including extra repair costs.)

Every car and truck takes a huge amount of energy to build, as well as tons of raw materials. Simply running the factory consumes huge amounts of energy with heating and air conditioning, welders, robots, lighting, the energy used in refining metals and creating plastic, and the oil diverted to creating the plastic. That’s not counting energy used in dealing with junked cars.

I understand, though I do not support, “cash for clunkers” programs where they crush vehicles with poor mileage and replace them with somewhat better ones. It might “pay,” energy-and-pollution-wise, over the lifetime of the car, though perhaps not for the expected remaining life of the old one.

But for cars that already have acceptable mileage, keeping them on the road is well worth any marginal levels of extra pollution they may emit, and chances are they would be replaced by cars that use more gas, not less (Cash for Clunkers, incidentally, excluded cars with decent mileage). That has been the trend in the United States — gas mileage rose dramatically in the 1980s and early 1990s and then fell. So keeping some of the old cars on the road cannot help but be a net gain.

Regardless of pollution and global warming arguments, here in the United States, we use far too much oil for our economy and national security. We have massive trade deficits from this and other wasteful practices which slowly suck the life out of our economy, and put us in debt to some very bad people.

When the Saudi Arabian terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon our leaders did not even mention Saudi Arabia, blaming it on Iraq. Quite aside from the flood of Saudi money pumped into both parties’ political campaigns, we do not dare offend the Saudis when they have such a hold on our economy. (Just as we cannot dare offend China, which responds to a gentle poke with a hard push.)

So let’s cheer on those people in the Allpar 200,000 mile club, even the ones with 440-powered Dodge D200 trucks. They’re not just preserving our history; they might even be saving energy and helping the nation.

Toyota taking the low road

Toyota has done a terrific job over the years of convincing people that it was a good company at heart. Paying workers in the U.S. more than it had to, sponsoring every athletic and racing activity known to Man, fielding the first hybrid-electric car (and for many years, the only practical one), and running feel-good publicity campaigns helped. So did having most of its cars going well beyond the letter of pollution control laws, and, of course, relying mainly on efficient four-cylinder sedans for its sales. Toyota also acted as a good corporate citizen by taking over a failed GM plant for its first U.S. factory, and shared its Corolla (or Matrix) with GM for years. Sure, GM didn’t sell many, but it’s the thought that counts.

They say you can tell a person’s real nature when they are under stress, and if that’s true, it bodes ill for Toyota, because their real nature has been very different from their public image.

When the economy went downhill, the faithful workers at NUMMI in California were immediately dropped, even as plans for new factories were retained. They will be the first Toyota workers to be permanently dismissed due to a moving factory, as far as I know. But Toyota’s attitude seems to be that though their primary product was the Toyota Corolla, they’re not real Toyota employees, so they don’t count. (GM did pull out first, but since GM only got a small number of cars from the venture, that couldn’t have been too significant. The factory, at one time, had the highest quality of any Toyota plant in North America.)

The first thing Toyota did when they were caught flouting American law was to get the talking points out, and the first talking point was, “Toyota did nothing wrong. NHTSA is favoring General Motors and Chrysler.”

A set of six governors from Toyota factory states (in the South) went on record as supporting Toyota and opposing government investigations. One ranted about how union activists “and their supporters” were clearly at fault. Not Toyota, of course. Toyota might have illegally delayed for five days before following a recall order, but that’s trivial. After all, they support the South. We should let them do whatever they want, right? Otherwise we we’ll be anti-industry. You know, like all those congressmen who voted to overrule Federal bankruptcy law and reinstate Chrysler and GM dealers.

At least one Republican did stand up for reality, pointing out that the NHTSA “bureaucracy” is the same as it was under Bush, with the implication being that blaming Obama is pointless. His voice was drowned out by the chorus of Toyota-lovin’, America-comes-after-my-state hack politicians.

NHTSA was apparently bending over backwards for Toyota under this administration, just like it did under previous administrations. Toyota even bragged about how they escaped serious recalls and delayed regulations for their own profit. Obama did nothing to attack Toyota; certainly he did not favor GM and Chrysler in the recall process.

There is one reason, and only one reason, why there is currently an investigation. That is because Toyota violated the law by waiting five days to implement an ordered recall. Had they not done that, they could have continued to thumb their nose at the foolish Americans, who open their borders and “play nice” while their economy is destroyed and eaten away.

Toyota’s anger and surprise is interesting. Surely they understood they couldn’t have it both ways forever? Or that you can only go so far before you step over the line? (Unless you’re a megabank, China, or Saudi Arabia.)

Also of interest is their arguments and those of their supporters (not counting Democrat Jennifer Granholm, who said she supported Toyota but didn’t say how; Toyota has a 1,200-person engineering installation in Ann Arbor.)  They blame unions. They blame Obama. They blame NHTSA. They say NHTSA is being swayed by GM/Chrysler-loving Obama and Democrats. The words “liberals” and “socialism” are surely one step away.

They even got one Republican to demand an investigation of the head of NHTSA on the accusation that he forced State Farm to come out against Toyota. (State Farm, incidentally, told a lobbying company that it had to drop Toyota due to conflict of interest.) State Farm is the insurance company that, last week, said it had, years ago, told Toyota about the problems which are now showing up as recalls.

But most people aren’t buying it. I haven’t seen the usual same-story-repeated-400-times-across-the-nuttier-right-wing-blogs yet, alleging a liberal socialist conspiracy led by Comrade Obama (they do talk like that, by the way. And there are nutty left-wing blogs too, though they seem to link rather than just reprinting large stories without credit and sometimes while changing key facts.) I haven’t gotten angry e-mails with clearly fictional allegations, of the GM-killed-the-electric-car variety. I haven’t seen Facebook groups forming around the Great Anti-Toyota Conspiracy. Because people aren’t buying it.

Well, that’s a nice thing, isn’t it? It gives one hope. They’ve pulled out their chief weapons, and none have worked. They worked when Chrysler closed all those dealers; they worked when GM and Chrysler were bailed out (when Bush dumped billions into them, nobody said the UAW had forced him to; when Obama did it, it was suddenly illegal and he did it just because of the UAW, according to many people, including the aforementioned blogs). The Toyota lobbyists seem to be stuck.

I’d like to say that maybe, with all this developing, just as it did with Mitsubishi, people might think, “Gee, if I was that wrong about Toyota, maybe I was wrong about GM and Chrysler and Ford being so bad, and I should try them out again.” No, word is that the Toyota buyers are just moving into Hondas. Well, you can’t win ‘em all. Especially since the reporters and analysts have everyone believing Chrysler isn’t making anything “people want to buy.” Shame this didn’t happen a year from now! But maybe it will… maybe Honda will turn out to have feet of clay as well.

By the way — yes, NHTSA appears to have been badly managed, like many government agencies. (That’s what you get when you elect people who don’t believe in government regulation but also don’t end it entirely.) They haven’t markedly improved under Obama, for that matter, but  it appears that their main flaw was not overbearing over-regulation, as Toyota and their shills would have you believe; it was being too forgiving and too gullible. That makes Toyota’s claims that Obama made the United States “not industry friendly” (as though Japan hasn’t also been enforcing recalls) even more absurd.

The new Toyota chief, Mr. Toyoda – that’s the correct spelling, the story behind Toyota’s spelling is at Toyoland’s Toyota history page – took full responsibility, but either he’s not really in charge or it’s just a mask, not meant to be taken seriously. Toyota’s been very vigorously pumping out the disinformation. Kudos to the American public and the mass media for not buying it, this time.