2002 Toyota Prius from North America - Comments

"If a small car (said Geo Metro WITH the converter) gets 50 mpg and the brand new hybrid gets 50 mpg and the Metro driver shuts off his engine at stop lights and stopped traffic, both drivers are going to fill up at the same time AND produce the same amount of emissions."

I'd be willing to bet that a Prius has significantly lower emissions than a car made in the early 90s. But even if we ignore that, your statement is misleading. If the Metro driver shuts off his engine at stop lights, he is causing several, if not dozens, of cars to idle their engines longer. Furthermore, the time between starting up the engine and the car moving forward certainly uses at least some gas and produces some emissions. While the Prius also has to start up its gasoline engine, it is already moving down the road while it's doing this, so at the very least the lag of cars behind it will not be the same.

This is unrelated to the quoted portion above, but I have seen a lot of uninformed responses from people claiming that the batteries in hybrids do more harm than good to the environment. I even remember one person claiming that the batteries in hybrids are about as harmful as nuclear waste, which is absolutely false. If you do some simple research, though, you'll find that Toyota has been recycling nickel metal hydride batteries since 1998, when they made an electric RAV4. NiMH batteries are used on Toyota and Honda hybrids and probably used on all hybrids from major manufacturers.