Prius Week: Is it going to make me fat?

It'd be stupid to suggest that more efficient, cleaner cars are a bad thing. Surely, getting to a point where cars produce little or zero emissions, and use no oil, would be a good thing - right?

To me, the biggest and most useful role the Prius plays today, is in acting as a technological stepping stone from where we are now, to where we're going to go in the future. It introduces the notion of a car being powered, and driving, differently to what many of us are used to, while still operating in a way we can understand and not looking so odd as to spook people out about our automotive future...

But last night, one unintended consequence of a future with zero-emission cars struck me right between the eyes. Allow me to explain. My own car sits outside the house most of the week, largely because I'm quite dictatorial about it not being used for short, local trips. Pick-ups at the station, shopping in Kingston, popping to the corner shop or supermarket - these aren't jobs for the internal combustion engine, they're jobs for my legs.

Yet at 8 o'clock last night, halfway through a Nigel Slater Japanese noodle recipe, I suddenly realised we didn't have a critical ingredient - the noodles. Normally at this point (besides swearing a lot), I'd have given up and cooked something else, or run half a mile up the road to Waitrose to get some. Yet, with a Prius parked outside, I didn't hesitate to jump in and glide up to said Supermarket, because hey, going in the car certainly was quicker than walking, and this was a hybrid car, so I could do most of the trip in electric mode and hence without guilt or emissions.

The issue this causes - potentially - is that we reach a point sometime in the future, where people stop thinking about the most appropriate mode of transport for a trip, and simply use their car regardless. I may be wrong, but today I think a healthy proportion of people now think about whether their car is the best vehicle to use for a very short local trip. I suspect two primary factors in this are cost and environmental concerns. But if we remove these two factors (which hybrid or electric cars potentially do) the unintended consequences are clear to see - worse traffic, more parking issues, all the usual stuff bandied about by the anti-car brigade. I'm treading a tricky line here. I'm not suggesting the Prius and the green car movement many credit it with creating is a bad thing, or that we should attempt to stop it. Lower carbon, less guilt car travel is largely a good thing. Yet I can't help wondering if we're asking the wrong question when it comes to urban travel. Electric cars are now seen as a panacea. But we should be wary, particularly about the impact on urban environments - of a future where we're using what is still a 1400kg, 10 square metre sized device to move one 80kg human a mile down the road.

Oh, and perhaps because of this type of driving behaviour, our average fuel economy has now fallen to 52mpg. Food for thought.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 16th October 2009

Comments

[Ben Kraal]

Yes!

I caught a 2nd gen Prius taxi home from the airport the other day and it ran most of the way on the engine. 20 minutes drive at between 50 and 80 km/h is not what the Prius seems to have been designed for -- it seems to have been designed for inner city pootling about. But, as you point out, is that what cars, in general, should be for?

I'd be much more interested in seeing hybrid white vans, trucks and busses. Vehicles that actually have to come into the city.

You and Mark did a video when you had the Insight where you said that because it was exempt from the congestion charge that you drove into the City when you might otherwise have caught the tube or the bus. In some ways that's an (un)intended function of the congestion charge but in other ways it's an indicator that maybe hybrids, or at least Pruis-sized hybrids solve the wrong problem.

[Charmermrk]

Totally agree Ben, and I think the success of cars like the Insight, Prius and the little EVs such as the G-Wiz in London is directly down to the fact that they're congestion charge exempt. There were numerous debates in the local press when the c-charge was introduced about whether it actually was a congestion charge - the argument being that, surely, if you were going to exempt any vehicles from the charge, then it should be ones that take up less space...

Agree also that it's a paradox of hybrids (and by virtue of their limited range - future electric cars) that they're best suited to usage on short, urban trips which we've for so long been told to avoid using cars for. It doesn't seem to be a problem many people are interested in though. Right now, the impetus is "get everyone in to electric cars", but my view would be that, once we're all driving in zero emissions vehicles, will we have really gained anything if we're still all stuck in traffic jams trying to drive in to city centres on our own, in our metal and glass boxes. I'd love to do an expansive piece of research entitled "does size matter" looking at the impact of moving to smaller personal vehicles for city usage. The thing I'm most excited about that I've seen recently for instance, in terms of the automotive world, is Renault's Twizy. I await with interest to see what impact it has.