Lexus is trying to make the luxury car even more luxuriouserish by going hybrid, according to treehugger.com and Reuters news.   The managing officer of Toyota, which owns Lexus, “intends to introduce hybrid versions of its Lexus luxury vehicles as early as possible,” says the news report.   He went on to say that the firm is “considering making the Lexus lineup hybrid-only.”

This is certainly great news for the future of green cars, if Lexus follows through.   But what really caught my eye when looking into this story was this quote from treehugger:

The cause of this change of strategy is probably higher fuel costs (even if they went down a bit lately) and, especially, the fact that the global sales of Lexus fell 9% on the year to 310,000 in the January-August period.

That obviously makes sense, but did Lexus really sell only 310,000 cars in half a year?  I think I saw 310,000 Lexus ads in that timeframe.   Literally.   And I mean that in the Joe Biden sense of the word, which of course means not literally at all.

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Sir Paul McCartney is said to be “horrified” that his spanking new hybrid car was flown 7,000 miles from Japan to the United Kingdom. The aging British rocker received the car, the $170,000 Lexus LS600H hybrid, as a gift for promotional work he had done for Lexus, but was mystified when the automobile was loaded onto a Korean Air flight and flown to Britain rather than arriving via ship as originally planned.

Transporting the car via jet created a carbon footprint nearly 100 times bigger than if the car had been sent by sea. Carbon offsetting firm CO2Balance.com estimated thatsending the enormous car on the plane created a carbon footprint of 38,050 kg as opposed to a 397 kg footprint for the three week boat journey.

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