It was a false meme going around a decade ago that it took more energy to make a Prius than a Hummer. Top Gear covered it in a episode with stories of bad mining in Canada and shipping to Asia for battery making and how much more energy intensive it is. It's all a crock (someone did a dust to dust on both cars) and that has carried into the energy to make batteries but that's even more of a crock as the energy to get oil in near the same as it is to get lithium but we just burn it up. Actually it's worse because there is so much more of it in the 600 million cars worldwide. The battery is different as you use for years and years and then recycle into more batteries.
Tell your guy that burning found, drilled, pumped imported oil in his car for ten years is far more wasteful than using your one battery for 10 yeas. You car's electricity?
It wasn't a decade ago. It was more like ~6 years ago. Unfortunately, the "conclusions" from the CNW "junk science" to this day STILL refuse to die, quoted by random anti-EV and anti-hybrid folks.
I still hear that garbage on other forums and random folks (who I don't personally know) on Facebook.
It doesn't help that Top Gear per
The secret behind the hit TV car show "Top Gear" - CBS News has 350 million viewers and reruns are being shown all the time.
An example of such a troll from late 2011 showed up and I responded to him at
Prius vs Hummer? Take that, Hummer!! | PriusChat.
As a Prius owner, I looked into this and did some calculations myself and we had PLENTY of discussions on Priuschat about this. Some of the links refuting that garbage are at
Environmental - Prius Wiki. And, I added some simple calculations at the bottom.
And, there are plenty of example refuting CNW's bogus claims that Priuses last only 109K miles at
Lifespan/Operating costs - Prius Wiki esp. given the HV battery is warranted for 10 years/150K miles in CA and CARB emission states.
I went thru an analysis of CNW's garbage spreadsheets (not sure if they're still up, but there were PDFs w/bits and pieces of the spreadsheets scattered). I was able to preserve it at
MY350Z.COM Forums - View Single Post - Thomas Friedman's foolish attacks on GM.
Jeremy Clarkson on the Prius - MY350Z.COM Forums was another exchange in 08. :|
edit: It looks like moron/shill Art Spinella/CNW no longer has the garbage PDFs or spreadsheets up anymore. But, you can still one of the garbage PDFs at
http://web.archive.org/web/20120115090142/http://cnwmr.com/nss-folder/automotiveenergy/DUST%20PDF%20VERSION.pdf. The file is crap but you can at least try to follow the scattered tables (from the spreadsheets that are gone now) and compare them to my above posts, if you wan.