Hybrid Car Review

I hate talking about this. I hate bad science being passed off as legitimate concerns. I know there are legitimate criticisms of hybrid cars out there, but I also know that this particular argument is just plain wrong. It has been proven wrong again and again and was even retracted by the company that made the claim in the first place. But it keeps popping back up.

What am I talking about? The CNW Marketing 'study' labeled "Dust-to-Dust: The Energy Costs of New Vehicles from Concept to Disposal." In case you missed it, the study claims that Hummers use up less energy than Prius do over the lifetime of a car.

Of course, such a comparison made people stop and look. And the story popped up on plenty of blogs, some newspaper articles (usually amateur ones) and I spent some time refuting the claims when and where I could. It was very depressing at the time to see these people being fooled by such foolishness.

And now the claims have been made on a prime time show, 'Boston Legal.' And, of course, many people are concerned such an outlet for bad science can lead people down the wrong path. Once again, I will say there are legitimate concerns about hybrid cars and they should be addressed. This dust to dust assumption piece was just wrong.

To see what Boston Legal said, here's an excerpt from youtube (I found this excerpt via ABG).

I'm not going to go into why these claims are foolish. It's already been refuted again and again:
(hybridcars.com, Pacific Institute, ABG, Toyota has even posted about it).

I know it's only a TV show, but more often than not, people are influenced by these shows because they have other things on their mind. They don't have the time or they don't care enough about these sorts of side issues to take the time to check on these types of stories (just as the writers of Boston Legal didn't bother to check the facts before using these sorts of bogus facts in the first place).

Hopefully, I won't be bringing this up again, but that's one of the downsides of the web. Everything is archived. There's no right or wrong placed on what's stored and what's left behind. So, we'll be seeing this story again.