Industry News
Toyota GB rubbishes “results” of CNW study of hybrids’ lifecycle energy use
5th October 2006
Toyota GB has issued a statement criticising a study carried out by a Californian marketing research agency CNW comparing the ‘dust to dust’ environmental impacts of various hybrid vehicles to their disadvantage with various conventional powertrain counterparts. The study, says Toyota, makes several assumptions which undermine its conclusions, and without a scientific peer review, Toyota says it is impossible to comment on any of these factors. Art Spinella of CNW has confirmed that his study was undertaken over a period of two years, without funding from any vehicle manufacturer.
Toyota notes that the CNW Marketing Research conclusions appear to be very different from the results of several other scientifically-reviewed studies of the lifecycle impact of vehicles (e.g. those of the US Argonne National Laboratory and Massachusetts Institute of Technology), which conclude that 80-85% of the total lifetime energy use of a vehicle comes from its use, with the remainder coming from the manufacturing and disposal stages, whereas the CNW study shows these ratios to be reversed.
CNW says of its 450+ page report, “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.
“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 … for classes of models, individual examples and our own analysis of the data.”
(www.cnwmr.com/nss-folder/automotiveenergy/)
News Headlines
