More Enviro-Friendly than a Prius?

One of our readers brought this interesting blog-post over on 37signals.com to my attention. It's definitely worth swinging over and taking a look. In a nutshell, Jason is highlighting a 450 page report, the result of a two-year study to calculate the actual carbon footprint of a vehicle - not just it's fuel consumption, but it's impact on the environment over the entire course of it's life, from design conception to scrapping. They call it a 'Dust to Dust Energy Report'. The results are more than a little interesting, and go to show that things are not always what they seem at face value.

CNW Marketing Research Inc. spent two years collecting data on the energy necessary to plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a vehicle from initial concept to scrappage. This includes such minutia as plant to dealer fuel costs, employee driving distances, electricity usage per pound of material used in each vehicle and literally hundreds of other variables.

In order to understand the 37signals blog-post, and the report, it's important to note the following:

To put the data into understandable terms for consumers, it was translated into a “dollars per lifetime mile” figure. That is, the Energy Cost per mile driven.

Although it brings up a valid issue - that of examining the real energy costs of the car over it's entire lifespan - I'm not convinced that the CNWMR.com report is totally unbiased. Maybe I'm just being a stick-in-the-mud, but it's hard for me to swallow that a Hummer could have a better 'dollars per lifetime mile' figure than all currently available hybrids, even if taking into account that leading edge, and short-run vehicle production incurs higher costs at the beginning of the life cycle (higher R&D, factory refitting, staff training, etc.).

This report does get one thinking about the overall impact of your vehicle on the environment though - rather than just focussing on fuel consumption on its own.

As monitoring emissions and carbon trading becomes more mainstream this kind of report will become easier to generate, and more cross-checkable.

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