How 'green' is your car?

[GrySql]

This is a 'cradle to grave' approach to rating cars, it takes into account the building, use and disposal of a car's lifespan.

 

"A scientific approach for estimating the environmental impacts of a product is known as lifecycle assessment, since it traces the impacts of a product from "cradle to grave": materials production and product manufacturing; emissions and other effects when the product is in use; through end-of-life effects of disposal and recycling. We developed the green scores and class rankings according to the principles of lifecycle assessment, using available data that are sufficiently standardized to be applicable to all makes and models."

 

What do you think?

 

http://www.greenercars.org/

http://www.greenercars.org/greenercars-ratings/how-we-determine-ratings

 

[Cobra348]

meanest - Bugatti Veyron and Lambo Aventador? And this is news ... how? <chuckle>

 

Interesting.

[talmy]

At least this one doesn't make the claim that a Hummer is greener than a Prius.

 

[Hybrider]

I applaud them for trying to rank the "greenness" of vehicles, but it is not something which I think is very easy to assess. If you assigned 10 different people to come up with a way to assess the greenness of various autos, I'm sure they would come up with 10 very different orders for ranking the autos. Consider that many people lament the impact of the lithium production on the environment, and that greenercars.org doesn't seem to use that data in their rankings at all.

 

In the greenercars.org rankings, one rating that jumps out at me as being very incorrect is the rating for the Lexus CT 200h. The greenercars.org table shows the CT 200h as having city/hwy MPGs of 51/48, yet the 2015 and 2016 EPA ratings both show the CT 200h as having ratings of 43/40.

 

Another interesting tidbit to me is that, after the Focus Electric, the next 3 Ford models in the rankings are all gas models, either Fiesta or Focus.

[Cobra348]

The Fiesta and FOcus gas models made me sit up until I looked ... they are the SFE packages and in the Fiesta, that's a 1.0L 3-cylinder turboboost engine that is something like 123 HP vs 120 in the 1.6L 4-banger Fiesta. For the Focus, I'm not sure what engine is in the SFE. But both of thee must have something going for them somewhere.

Edited October 28, 2015 by Cobra348