Got any info on that, fart?
I know (and agree with) the arguments against the green cred of a Prius, but haven't seen anything on the Zero.
My gut feeling is that the Zero will be a lot less hypocritical than the Prius as it has no petrol motor, much smaller battery packs, etc etc.
'Energy can be neither created nor destroyed'. Leaving the Carbon Footprint of development and production, and the potential bio hazard pollution of production and disposal of nic cad batteries to one side, the energy to run the bike as to come from somewhere.
Currently for trail riding at Yass you either go to a servo and get energy/petrol store as hydrocarbons 600 million years ago and then release the carbon in the Yass environs, or you plug into the electricity grid and use electrical energy created by burning energy/coal store as hydrocarbons 600 million years ago in a Power station in the Hunter Valley and then release the carbon into the Hunter environs.
Unless the electricity is produced by a sustainable means such as wind power, wave power or solar, the electricity is not green but simply moves the source and concentration of the carbon pollution. (And please don't argue Nuclear - the unaddressed safety and environmental issues associated with nuclear and in particular nuclear waste are proven and just as great if not greater than Global warming.)
All of which is (should be!) well understood. I remember a statistic from 10~15 years ago, which basically said that it took a new car 7 or 8 years to 'pay off' the environmental impact of its production.
In other words, the amount of energy used to make the new car, was seven years' difference in fuel economy (compared to an older car).
Now that new cars are 'all' EFI and fuel economy improvements are much smaller than they were 15 years ago, I suspect that it takes even longer than 8 years before a new car is environmentally justified (new era turbo Diesels aside).
The Prius fails to live up to its environmental promise because its production involves a full petrol powered car,
plus all of the electric stuff.
At the end of the vehicle's life, the batteries are also an enviromental problem.
The Zero, on the other hand, has none of the environmental production costs that a petrol engine brings with it, it weighs less than a conventional bike, and the battery packs are much smaller. Hence my questioning of whether they're really worse than a normal bike.
The generation of electricity to charge a Zero can be purchased as Green Power from (I believe) every commercial electricity provider in the country, so that's a bit of a non-issue.
You wouldn't even have to be super keen to set yourself up with a fairly dinky home solar set up just to charge your Zero (or whatever).
I do agree with Lozza's assessment that we're far more likely to end up with some form of fuel cell/hydrogen power than battery electricity. The most likely exception is if there's a sudden break-through in battery technology.
