Save the planet: Drive a manual!

For a while now, there has been something bothering me. People are very big on fuel economy and save the planet and global warming climate change.... and yet more and more people are driving cars with Automatic transmission.

Almost without exception, a manual transmission will use between 5% and 25% less fuel than an automatic. "But I can't drive a manual..." Then learn! (except for those who are physically unable to drive a manual)

I spend over an hour driving every workday and in that time I'm confounded by those who drive automatics. Every time you use your brakes, you are wasting the fuel you have used to establish that inertia. Those who drive automatics seem to near-continuously ride their brakes to maintain a constant speed.

In addition, the purpose of brake lights is to indicate a vehicle is slowing to others around them. If you've got these people who drive automatics near continuously riding their brakes, the result is more rear-end accidents because we don't know if they're just maintaining a constant speed or if they are actually slowing down.

And my final point. The Prius. Some of you would know this car is my pet peeve. It claims a milage of 4.4 L/100km but in real world city driving its close to 5.5 L/100km. Lets compare this to a Corolla. Your standard 1.8L manual corolla achieves about 7.5 L/100km and costs AUD$17,000 less than a prius with a similar feature set. Thats a 36% saving in fuel for an 85% additional purchase cost.

As a comparison, my car (1998 Lotus Elise) cost less than a Prius and uses, in real world figures about 9 L/100km. In addition, I don't have the environmental footprint of all the fossil-fuel based plastics used in the Prius' construction, nor the environmental hazard of the Nickle Metal Hydride batteries or the cost of replacing those batteries every 5 years. (with a bonus that it does 0-100km/h in about 5 seconds, handles better than 99.9% of the cars on the road and sounds brilliant)

So instead of a Prius, buy a Corolla, use the $17,000 different to convert your house to be more environmentally friendly and then take a holiday with the change.

Here are some figures.

Assume you drive 20,000km per year in your Corolla or Prius

Car	L/100km	L per year	Fuel $ per year
Prius	5.5	1,100	$ 1,375
Corolla	7.5	1,500	$ 1,875

So, with your $17,000 additional spend, you save $500 per year in fuel costs. Does this make sense to ANYONE?

Oh, and for $3000 more than a Corolla, you can get a VW Golf Turbo Diesel which achieves 5.5 L/100km... hang on... that's not a hybrid... oh, and you can use Biodiesel with the Golf. The VW Polo is even lower, at 5 L/100km.