Solar-Powered Toyota Prius

When it comes to global warming, climate change and environmentally friendly cars, you could always do your bit by buying the Toyota Prius.

Despite the fact that I like to saunter around the country in my four litre Jeep and tend to subscribe – somewhat stubbornly and perhaps a little ignorantly – to the theory that the planet has been warming up for the best part of two and a half million years and therefore there’s not an awful lot we can do to stop it, I have to admit that I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for Toyota’s green car.

This isn’t because it can single-handedly reverse rising sea levels and stop the moon from crashing in to us - because it can't - but because it’s probably the greatest loop hole in automotive history. You can buy a Prius from just £17’932 and then reap back the savings in tax, better fuel economy and – if you live, work or socialise in London – save a small fortune on the Congestion Charge. You can sit at dinner parties and extol the green credentials of your little car and Jennifer Aniston will strip naked and offer to sleep with you because you’re saving the lives of countless penguins. Probably.

The Prius has become synonymous around the globe for its environmental credentials, but just because Leonardo DiCaprio drives one doesn’t mean it actually works. I love the Prius because it flies in the face of Climate Change convention. It is sold to the masses on its ability to drive around on batteries for a week (as long as you don’t accelerate hard or drive above 27mph) and it’s full of clever gizmos like a Kinetic Energy Recovery System, which performs weird acts of voodoo such as using the heat energy produced under braking to recharge the batteries that allow you to travel around silently, scaring old grannies who think it’s safe to cross the road.

It’s quite a spacious little car, too and, if you opt for the top of the range T-Spirit model you’ll get leather seats and satellite navigation and funky climate control and all sorts of other mod-cons that were once the preserve of the £80’000 Mercedes S-Class.

The 1.5 litre petrol engine, which comes to life when you exceed 27mph or accelerate hard, will get you to sixty in a modest 10.9 seconds but will break a sweat if you try to push it past its top speed of 105mph. The tiny 104 g/km of CO2 that its combined petrol-electric engine produces place it in the lowest tax band, meaning just £15 a year road tax and make it completely free to drive in to London, saving a potential £2’080 a year in Congestion Charge fees. It reportedly returns 66mpg too – although I did recently get 64mpg out of a 1.6 diesel Citroen Picasso, so there are economical competitors out there.

But what really makes me laugh with this car isn’t the fact that the batteries only last 100’000 miles before they need chucking in the sea, or that the land around the Arizona factory that builds them is desecrated by acid, both facts of which aren’t really that great for people trying to get pretty ladies to sleep with them based on the fact that they’ve saved a polar bear. It’s the fact that when you drive in to London, without paying Congestion Charge, and sit in gridlocked traffic on a really hot day, you’re going to want the air conditioning on.

And to make the air conditioning work, the little Prius has to do the one thing it tries its hardest not to do. It starts the engine.

So I did smile this morning when I read the news that, for the third incarnation of their environmentally friendly motor, Toyota have announced a solar-powered solution* for the top-of-the-range models that will generate the power to run the vehicle’s air conditioning system.

Using Kyocera solar panels, presumably built in to the roof, Toyota estimate they can generate between two and five kilowatts of electricity, which will then allow their drivers to run the air conditioning whilst sitting in traffic in Stealth Mode.

It doesn’t sound like a lot to me, so I’m guessing that there will probably still have to be some form of mechanical back-up that will run the a/c generator for times when it’s a little bit dark.

Like the engine. At night time.

--

* the original news article, as reported by the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7492647.stm