Used cars: A sunk cost with positivity

This article in wired explains it all pretty well - If you are buying a hybrid to go green, think again. There are enough used cars in the market. Hybrids or not, these offer a better and more efficient way to conserve energy, stay cheap and go green. In fact, here is a better way to calculate how much your decision to buy any car impacts the environment: Car manufacturers are busy manufacturing the latest models and tracking demand. Each new model picked off from the market contributes to two or more they will produce new. Producing a new car means more energy will be spent and this we need to factor into what we are saving overall with new technology. As the article says, the dent made by the energy required to produce a Toyota Prius is almost 100K miles of driving with it already wasted.

Basically the idea is to choose efficiently and waste less. However, it comes at the cost of affecting profits of car companies which in turn makes the new cars more expensive as time passes and technology adoption/evolution slower.