Re: What's the verdict on the Prius?

The Watt previously had a discussion on the CNW dust to dust analysis of different cars: perhaps it can be resurrected? From memory the Prius came up poorly due to some contentious issues. Because Toyota chose a (ridiculously?) conservative lifetime estimate of 100,000 miles for the Prius, CNW chose that too. Next CNW used the method of assigning all of the energy accrued during the design stage of a car (even including the energy expended by the design engineers coming to work, etc) and distributing it over the cars produced. As the Prius was very new in concept and few had been sold when the analysis was made this seemed an unrealistic procedure to me. I think they admitted that as new models and more Priuses were sold that this front loading per car would drop considerably. Finally they included a high recycling cost at the end of the Prius's life, presumably because of the high tech batteries. Again this seemed rather speculative to me.