2 posts tagged “toyota prius”

Some more photos to share from around Wellington, New Zealand, and to show it’s not always sunny!

   This is actually Chews Lane but I thought it was strange seeing a second sign, on the opposite side, reading Tow Away Lane—but in the style of a regular street-name sign. Hence the filename Odd Name for a Street. Across the road is the local HQ for the Fairfax Press.    A lot of cities have fleets of so-called “green cabs” and Wellington is no exception. There are these ugly little eggs running around called Toyota Priuses, which may have looked good for about, ooh, one Oscar telecast’s arrivals. After that, they got pretentious.
   This one has the licence plate 0 SMOG. But it’s a hybrid, so when the petrol engine is in play, it does generate something out of the exhaust, surely? I know we have unleaded fuel and catalytic converters, but from what little I know of emissions this still generates more pollution than the regular Ford Falcon LPG cabs that run around Wellington—which, technically, should have this plate. If Wellington’s main taxi company is clever, it can tell us how many LPG Falcons it has running and compare the quantity to the fleet of these Green Cabs.
   I think Green Cabs is doing a good thing, generally, and certainly a Prius’s interior room is sufficient for most journeys, but I can remember the 1980s when most cabs here ran on natural gas, be they Holdens or Fords, and generated far less pollution than modern cars. We have, of course, the National Government of the 1990s to thank for their demise, and the Labour Government to continue its “rival’s” (ha ha) folly.    People my age will remember the Trades’ Hall and how it was the site of a bombing in the mid-1980s. Caretaker Ernie Abbott was the victim of the after-hours blast. I don’t think it was ever solved and I wonder if it qualifies as our first terrorist bombing.
   Trevor Loudon shares some theories on his blog but he admits they are hearsay. He refutes the rumour that it was a right-wing group and instead points to Marxists and various pro-Soviet groups committed to unseating the Muldoon Government. The irony is that the Labour Government that followed proved more anti-union and right-wing than they might have expected. One commenter on Mr Loudon’s blog wrote, ‘If your theory is true Trevor then the irony of the outcome was classic. They got a Labour Government alright, but it contained good’uns like Douglas, Prebble, Bassett, De Cleene, Caygill & Moore.’
   However, Loudon is also right in responding, ‘True Spirit, but the Soviets also got NZ's anti nuclear policies and the destruction of ANZUS. Which do you think the Soviets cared about most?’
   Whatever the case, we began losing a lot of our values and the integrity of our national system that decade, after the change in government. We can trace the growing gap between rich and poor right back to 1984, when we moved from a reasonably egalitarian and fair society to one which has an underclass and domination by foreign corporations.

Further to an earlier post: so how did the New Zealand Government get us folks, happily driving around in natural gas cars with a huge natural-gas network of stations nationally, back into petrol (or gasoline to our American readers) in 1996? Well, there was this ad:

If you’re going to drive a gas guzzler, shouldn’t the birds and the trees know? Sure, you can use LPG and CNG. But they don’t even smell strong. Let ’em feel the power of petrol—good, healthy petrol that really say you’ve arrived. Let your V8 make your winters warmer. There might not be many tigers left out there, but you can stick them in your tank. Petrol. In 91 and 96 octane.

   OK, so there wasn’t that ad. It was pretty easy though: the National Government had been raising the tax on natural gas for a few years. When that didn’t sway New Zealanders from using domestically made natural gas and not depleting our foreign exchange reserves, they plain turned off the tap.
   In 1996, it was announced to all the gas stations that there would be no more CNG. LPG would continue, but the stations—all with the warm, fuzzy names of Shell, BP, Mobil and Caltex (part-owned by Texaco, which forms the Tex in the name)—were somehow hazy about its availability. Panic ensued. We got rid of our gas-powered Ford Sierra. (You could switch between CNG and petrol. Most converted cars since the late 1970s were dual-fuel, since the hybrid term had not been coined for cars then. Can someone please tell me or any New Zealander why the Toyota Prius is novel?)
   As it turned out, there were still plenty of LPG stations around, but by then we were driving around and letting the birds and the trees know.
   These days, you tend to see cab drivers use LPG but preciously few other people. This is a far cry from the 1980s and early 1990s, when natural gas-powered cars were normal. All of a sudden, the Labour Government thinks E10 is revolutionary. E10, in this country, is not revolutionary.
   Since 1996, we now happily pay 50 per cent more for petrol, polluting our environment and using US dollars to do so. Go, petrol! Yay, OPEC, New Zealand politicians love you!