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
Like

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.

Well, not really, as we actually wanted real cow-hide leather interior in our Prius, but had to "settle" for Toyota's SofTex®...and...go UP a model (from -3 to -4) just to get that thermoplastic polyuerethane (imitation leather) stuff! Needless to day, we were "pissed"!

So, I think you detected my not-so-latent hostility toward Toyota's marketing crap.

Who cares about the environment? I just want more MPG so I have more cash in my pocket.

This is ecomodder.com not pennypincher.com seems to be a common mistake ;)

You really haven't thought this through.

The ultimate ECO car would be built of natural materials where possible.

Wood lasts 100's of years in houses, medieval castles and so on, and can always be sanded back and refinished. Even when old houses are knocked down, the timber is reused/ remilled. Plastic goes 20 years and turns brittle and becomes landfill. Cutting down a tree is not a bad thing really, as (and this is if you think CO2 is somehow a poison) the CO2 is stored in the wood until it's burned or decomposed.

Synthetic fabric derived from oil? So ECO, not. I actually think natural hide is the most ECO friendly seat covering, providing the tanning chemicals can be 'controlled'. As long as it's cared for, it will outlast the car. Keep in mind that cows produce more 'green house gasses' than cars.

As has been said, the best car would be one that last a lifetime, or more.

Honestly, I am in favor of leather. How long does a good saddle last? Horses run on oats and create fertilizer.

They just fertilize the road, which is less useful.

http://i.imgur.com/RVErr1k.jpg

I guess that my idea is that I want to take care of this world because it is where I keep all of my stuff.

By the way, the quote is from the cartoon.

economymodder.com?

I'm with the wolf here, any environmentally friendly properties of my car is only a side effect of cost efficiency. I run my ignition timing advanced to the edge of what will pass both parts of a smog test, I put out more HC, CO, and NOx per cubic meter of exhaust gas (I even put out more HC, CO, and NOx per cubic meter than my dad's carburated corolla in part because I'm on factory catalysts and catalyst efficiency monitoring oxygen sensor and until 2013 I was on the factory upper oxygen sensor) vs running the ignition timing retarded, but my overall exhaust gas volume is lower. Even better, unless I run the AC at idle my car can't even keep the catalysts lit up anymore because they are so degraded.

Just to add to the "pro-wood" side of this conversation: My friend is working on a 1931 Ford or Chevy pickup made almost completely out of wood. How many 80 year old metal cars do you see on the road these days??

Innocent animals killed for leather? Beef comes from innocent animals as well. Would you rather the hide is just thrown away when the meat is harvested?

The imitation leather sounds worse for the environment and never lasts as long as the vehicle.
What was the benefit exactly?
Oh I forgot, their bottom line.

Saving the world?

Enabling people to claim they are saving the world?

I still think that horses are the answer, but bicycles allow you to burn McDonald's instead of oats.

Burn, McDonald's, burn!

Exactly, but Toyota hypes the SofTex® as being eco-friendly:

"What is SofTex®?

SofTex® is a synthetic leather seat material designed for wear, easy cleaning and resisting spills. Soft to the touch, SofTex weighs about half as much as genuine leather. The way it's made generates around 85% fewer CO2 emissions and 99% fewer Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) than conventional synthetic leather. It also does not include any animal-based material."

• source: Toyota FAQS: What is SofTex®?

Unless the resins used in that artificial leather-like material were vegetable-based, its manufacturing process is not really so much environmentally-better than real leather.

Softex is made of polyurethane, which is made from isocyanate, a highly toxic chemical usually made from petroleum based raw materials.

Unfortunately, Greek yogurt is supposed to be bad for the environment, too. Here is an article: Whey-ing Greek yogurt’s environmental impact – Eatocracy - CNN.com Blogs

Huh. According to that article, Greek yogurt producers do not dump acid whey into the environment like my hippie sister indicated, they give it to farmers, who use it for a variety of uses.

I thought this was relevant, but it turned out to be trivial. Please pardon the interruption.

I thought eco was a reference to economics? :p

Various reasons bring people to this site, and my interest is in both economics and ecology.

Fortunately, things that are cheaper usually take less energy to produce, so that satisfies both objectives. Of course, this is not always the case.

Also note in the fine print that Toyota compares their synthetic to other leading synthetics, and not to real leather.

Which means its not as good as real leather.

Yep you nailed it.

I could have told you that. Whey is incredibly useful and valuable.
I work maintenance at a cheese plant now. They make a lot of whey too.
Work makes me hungry.

Chances are if you eat cheese, you are eating my cheese.

Sure, but it's still not so "environmentally-friendly" when compared to real leather.

And I thank you sir!

Sam

I guess naugahyde is now out of favor. The wife snuck in a polyester shirt this weekend.
After 63 years, it sill feels like I wearing a torture device. I think I could sweat on the north pole in a polyester shirt.

regards
mech

Amen! I'm the same exact way!

I live in socal, cotton or shirtless.

Tillamook Cheese?

When I mustered out of the military years ago, civilian life seemed exceedingly strange. One way was that in the military, trucks were sent to 'rear echelon maintenance' every few years. The only thing that corresponds in civilian life is a frame-off restoration of a classic car. Civilians just trade up and let the increasingly poorly-maintained car 'trickle down' to the lower classes.

Must haves

• Hemp particleboard. Heard a Mercedes Benz (not sure which one) has door panels made of such.

Must NOT haves

• Automatic transmission, power steering, power brakes, air conditioning, water pump.

I was thinking Bandon.

The wife insisted we get Tillamook cheese believing it was the best. Bandon was cheaper, so I bought both and had a cheese tasting. I told my wife if she selected the Tillamook as the best tasting cheese, we would always get that brand. She choose the Bandon, and now we buy whichever is on sale. Both make a tasty cheddar.

Anyone who thinks animals get killed for leather is sadly mistaken animals, and for the most part cows, get slaughtered for beef and leather is nothing more than a byproduct of that industry. So unless you plan on giving up burgers and steaks which I certainly don't plan to do there is going to be plenty of leather to go around. As far as wood goes consider this, which is worse, chopping down a few trees, or manufacturing more plastics, even if they are recycled ones, which involves the use of some pretty nasty chemicals and other stuff you don't want to mess with.

Plastics are used for the synthetic fabric on the seats most of the dash and trim plus a ton of other stuff and the manufacturing process is not by any means friendly to the environment so if you want a truly Eco-friendly car don't just blindly follow whatever the tree hugging vegan hippies are saying but actually think about what is involved in that material all together.

I love blind taste tests at home. :) Unfortunately a five year old can always pick the Kraft mac and cheese no matter how many other things you throw at him.

Similar ANALOGIES:

• Chickens are killed for their FEATHERS for pillows instead of their meat...NOT!
• Cows are killed for their HIDES for leather products instead of their meat...NOT!

• Chickens are skinned for their leather...NOT!

/but Ostriches are

Likely supply them and many others.