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Originally Posted by diver110
Right now I drive a Volvo 850 and get low to mid-20s MPG. I plan to make my next car a hybrid, possibly the Toyota Prius if I can live with the seats (I have a bad back, so that is a touchy issue for me, no pun intended). I am assuming that it is environmentally wiser to drive my car into the ground then buy a new hybrid. If I sell the Volvo and buy a hybrid now, someone else will just be driving the Volvo, and the enviromental cost of making the new car that I would buy I assume offsets the benefit of my driving a hybrid. Am I missing anything?
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You make a very good point. I guess if you trade your volvo now, the next person to drive it would probably drive it as long as you would have, had you not traded it in. Its continued CO2 emissions will make a contribution to our environ woes. But, it will eventually get recycled and its contribution to the environ will be done. In the meantime, you would have been driving a greener car and contributing less to the CO2 problem vs buying another non-hybrid. Eventually, most people will be driving greener vehicles so the sooner the old ones bite the dust the better. As far as the materials used to make the car, all cars are mfg'd in a similar manner out of similar materials so that is a non issue (hybrid batteries excluded, as they are recycled as well). Then there's the neighbor that burns all his yard waste....that has to be much worse for the local environment than building a car...I believe it's what comes out of the tailpipe/mile/gallons of fuel consumed that matters the most, as most people will be driving a lot of miles.