Really ecological cars shouldn't have leather seats, wooden dash...
 

Let's make a list of non fuel consumption or emissions related features that a really ecological car should / shouldn't have
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Must haves
* Recycled plastic bottle parts. To help reduce the millions of plastic bottles thrown away everywhere. Heard a Mercedes Benz (not sure which one) has window frames made of such bottle plastic.

Must NOT haves
* Leather seats. No need to kill innocent animals just to get their skin when a synthetic fabric will do as fine. Maybe even better as they are longer lasting?
* Wooden dash. No need to cut trees as a plastic will both last longer and absorb impacts better.
* Harmful materials like asbestos, Heavy metals like Lead and Mercury and many other harmful chemicals.

Let's get creative yet hopefully not ridiculous...

Lets not do this exercise.

Trees and cows are renewable. The millions of cows wouldn't exist if we didn't find them useful.

Recycling everything isn't necessarily better for the environment. It often takes more energy to recycle something than to just make a new product. It's pointless to recycle most plastics and glass, but recycling metal usually makes sense.

The best thing someone can do for the environment is kill themselves. For crazies that think humans are not of nature, and that the "environment" is the most important thing, there is the voluntary human extinction movement.

Ecological cars will last forever.
 

Or as long as possible. The longer the better.

Leather will always be available until people quit eating animals.

Material choices are ecological if they can be easily recycled. Steel is recyclable. Aluminum has huge energy benefits to recycle. Thermo-form plastics do. Glass does. So does the lead in our current batteries. The bottom line is to make a car last as long as possible and then get the parts into the recycle stream.

And wood is a most excellent building material as it is renewable - if we are smart about it.

Now the problem becomes powering the vehicle.

Seriously, what's ecologically wrong with wood? Its a renewable resource. If I want a nice maple dash, I'm doing way less harm cutting a tree that will grow back within my lifetime than mining up all the steel, aluminum, and petroleum that went into the other 99% of the car and won't be replaced except on a geological time scale.

Signed,
A forester

What about bamboo over wood? :) I was surprised when I read that the higher-end Prii came standard with leather.

Do the same cows give us leather and beef?

Leather is just about always a premium or luxury option these days.

How about getting 20 or 30 years out of a car and actually taking care of it so it doesn't spend the last several years of life being a motor oil burning POS that leaks every fluid possible through every seal both internally and externally.

Yes and I don't think there is enough of a market to use all the leather produced by the beef industry.
I know they use every drop of blood they can catch, all the bone, feet, organs, but I am not sure all the leather gets used.

The 'higher-end' Toyota Prius models do NOT come standard with leather but rather with SofTex®, a man-made synthetic (thermoplastic polyurethane) FAUX leather-like material:

• Toyota: http://toyota.custhelp.com/app/answe...oftex%C2%AE%3F
• SAE: http://articles.sae.org/11983/

Maybe tires made out of rocks, with holes in the floor where you run in place to move it along. Need to lose the Pterodactyl soft top as that stuff is tough to come by these days. I did see a sign for "green car" parking in front of the Safeway. Is that only for green, or would sort of a teal still be OK?

What is wrong with most people's plans of purchasing a new car every five years and just getting rid of the old one.

Old Tel, I would have stood corrected, but you seemed a little obsessed there.