Toyota Prius and Cristian Manafu - quite a trendsetter among Romanian bloggers – invited me today to a bloggers’ discussion about hybrid cars. Albeit, the presentation of the company’s representatives and their interaction with the public could have been more aggressive and more lively, but the meeting was not purely commercial in scope. And bloggers are not PR vehicles that you can control too easily.

What I remember best from the company’s presentation is that one Toyota Prius is worth 71 trees (funny calculus, but convincing) and that 83% of a car’s impact on the environment occurs during its exploitation as a vehicle, not during production or destruction. I remembered this because I read recently in the Daily Dish that “manufacturing the Prius’s battery is extraordinarily carbon-intensive.” So I thought this car manufacturers must be hiding some other things, too. It seems they are not. Prius seems damn sleak and reliable.

All in all however, Prius and hybrid cars in general have seduced me on their side. I don’t even find the design that repulsive, and I definitely enjoy the mere thought of polluting less.

How about you? Do you trust a hybrid? Would you be willing to spend more on getting one? Is it a whim or a necessity?

Here’s some ideas Romanian bloggers mentioned (till now, all of them seem to like the hybrid car, although I nagged with Dragos Bucurenci they would write negative stuff about the event): Adrian Ciubotaru, Sorin Tudor, Dragos Dehelean, Marius Tudor, Marius Balaci, Vlad Bogos, Anca, INConstantIN (I hope I spelled it right), Alex Rosu (the only critical entry and the only one written in English), Dan Dumitrescu (the president of the ecologist party in Romania, and the guy I voted for in the recent local elections), Filip Lepus, Dragos Bucurenci (whose organization is powered by Toyota Prius), and Cabral (who writes a broader entry on eco-Romania), and Swamp (a specialized eco blog I just discovered), and many more.