I don’t know why people do that, but it seems like lately there are more and more vandalism acts on Priuses. For example, as Edmunds.com writes, a woman’s Prius has been hit several times with a hammer. Stone age-like acts, really…
I understand that Top Gear’s “demo” on assaulting a 2001 Prius with an automatic rifle was a little bit more out of sense, but they had probably bought the car prior to destroying it…
Another Prius has been set on fire by vandals, while the owner was watching it burning in front of his house.
There are several anti-Prius movements, and even web sites of those, who seem to hate Prius drivers for not being like them. Is it some kind of revenge against the environmentalist movement? Is a man owning a Prius guilty of wearing an image of something so annoying? Are we, environmentalists, so annoying, after all?
If it wasn’t for the Prius, it would have been other hybrid car hitting the front lines, but I realize after all that it’s not the car’s fault, nor the drivers’. It’s natural for this to happen, like it did to the first Christians in the first centuries.
It’s just that nowadays we don’t have much time and money to turn to ash and then resurrect from it. We’d better try not to buy and use so much stuff and gasoline. That way people could help themselves, and their pockets, if they don’t care so much about the environment after all.
Why doesn’t this sort of things happen to Hummers, for instance?
I can wholly identify; and I have the utmost sympathy. Those photographs gladdened my heart when I saw them.
I understand this: it is a symbolic act of revolt against the misuse of the environment as a pretext for tyranny. The Prius does not symbolize concern for the environment as much as the eco-authoritarian approach to it. I am an eco-localist, and therefore my opposition to eco-authoritarianism is vehement.
Because of their increased complexity and reliance on user-opaque automatic systems, hybrids do even more to entrench the current system of industrial overproduction, which is the true and sole cause of our ecological predicament, than other modern cars. Elaborate structures of legislation in most countries require that vehicles are such that their mode of manufacture is that which is most favourable to the transnational mass-producer. Cars are designed around a mode of manufacture that requires and promotes an ever-increasing volume of output, and the manufacturer is protected by legislation from the possibility of maverick low-volume competition.
It must be understood that environmental legislation around motor vehicles has always served to protect the position of the established motor industry, and has allowed it the circumstances under which to increase production far above any hypothetical spontaneous demand. It has always been about keeping unsaturated a market for motor vehicles that would probably have been quite oversaturated by 1970.
The only sensible ecological campaign around motor vehicles would be a campaign to boycott the motor industry, and never to buy a new car. The purpose of such a campaign should not be to bully the motor industry into changing its ways – its corporate structure does not allow for that – but to starve it to death. I have resolved never to buy a car designed later than 1975, or manufactured after 2000.
The real solution is radically to reduce the demand for vehicles by introducing better patterns of settlement, enabled by localized systems of economy, and to allow simple, durable, fixable, rebuildable, adaptable, tamperable vehicle designs, suited to low-volume manufacture by local fabricators, component-makers, and assemblers, and use in a context in which vehicles are relatively rare.
Does anyone else share this vision?
Hello Dawie,
Although at first your opinion looked fairly justified, approaching its end led me thinking to primitive, unsafe cars. In the 1970s, cars didn’t have any emission control, which is fairly visible when you sit in one’s tail. It seems reasonable to me to buy a new car only when you don’t have a choice, and it also seems reasonable that the manufacturers should make cars last more than a few years, like they did in the 70’s. You can’t blame technology for evolving and for giving us comfort and safety. It’s true technological processes should change to benefit local economies rather than traveling around the world to build a car…
Because the tree huggers are so out of touch. How they think their ONE Prius is going to single handedly save the world makes me chuckle. And when you see them driving, either their windows are tinted because they are to embarassed to be seen in them, or they look like they are in some fantasy world where they are the savior. I let them have their moment, and then when they park them, people go give the car and people what it deserves, while I drive by in my Denali. Oh and your big battery in that prius that needs to be replaced in six years is going to be helping the environment by sitting in a land fill? Thats not being friendly to the environment. Tisk Tisk!!!!!
I know exactly what the cause is, it’s the result of the brainwashed Rush L-imbeciles out there. Conservative rightwing morons out there have been brainwashed by the oil industry through paid-off talk-radio hosts like Oxycontin Boy Rush Limbaugh.
Ok, I admit I don’t have a Prius myself, but I don’t see how Prius drivers are in any way more “nosed-up” than Mercedes S-class drivers, or some other type of luxurious rolling palace on streets. Anyway, it may be the fact that they are content with their car, have the (wrong) attitude of superiority because “look, my engine doesn’t run at stops, etc”, and often belong to the middle class, aspiring to the nose and infatuation of the higher ones. Rich people, on the other hand, aren’t so fond of a $25,000 purchase, it’s like their ordinary car, because they have their Bugatti or Ferrari waiting in their garage, so Prius is a freebie near those. So after all I think this attitude is not new at all and it’s mostly a problem of an infatuate person, not an environmental infatuation. What do you think?
If you really don’t understand the reason behind these acts of vandalism, then allow me to opine.
Most individuals that drive Prius are SNOBS and Elitests (SP??). The holier than thou attitude is really annoying.
Do not get me wrong, these are criminal acts and should be dealt with as such, but please Save the Humans (we really don’t have to worry about the planet the planet will take of itself) by example and don’t look down your nose when you do it.
Probably moslems