There is a reason big, gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles continue to crowd parking lots. SUVs are eminently practical – capable of hauling any combination of people and stuff. There is plenty of storage space for snacks and wipes and coloring books and CDs and on and on.

The downside to such handiness: horrific fuel economy.

But there is a new breed of vehicle that offers much of the practicality of a big SUV and boasts 30 mpg, give or take. Can you chauffeur six soccer players to practice? No, but you can shuttle four. And how often are you filling up an SUV cargo hold with lumber or bales of pine straw?

Most people don’t really need to drive a big box on wheels. A little box will do just fine.

The Scion xB demonstrated the practicality of a little box and quickly developed a cult following. That quirky car now has some competition with the introduction this year of two new box cars: the Kia Soul and Nissan Cube (pictured, right).

Both are aimed at Generation X – or is it Gen Y? Or the Millennials? Whatever they’re calling twentysomethings these days – the Cube and the Soul are designed to show that it’s hip to be square.

How they compare:

Outside the Box

An angled windshield, rounded nose and rear of the Soul (pictured, left) soften the basic box look, giving it a look reminiscent of a Honda CRV. First impression is still “cute”, but in a mainstream sort of way.

There is nothing mainstream about the look of the Cube. This is a distinctive, attention-grabbing econo-box. A key element in turning heads is the asymmetrical wraparound side/rear window on the passenger side. The tinted glass hides the right rear pillar.

If you want to drive a car that gets attention, the edge goes to the Cube.

How do cars pollute? In two main ways, through inefficient mileage (guzzling a gallon of gas every eight or 10 or 14 miles) and through tailpipe emissions.

There’s the pollution associated with manufacturing, also, but to keep it simple let’s stick with emissions and mileage. Obviously, both affect the air. Think of mileage as a measure of your car’s pollution volume over time – if a gallon of gas doesn’t take you very far, you have to burn a lot more gas — and emissions as the chemistry of that pollution; if the mix is particularly noxious, your car will be a bigger offender than one with better tailpipe controls.

So if you want to buy the cleanest car you can — in the price range you need — you’ll look at both factors. Fortunately, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has already done this work, assigning a  “greenhouse gas” score to most models. Find it at the EPA’s Green Vehicles website.

The EPA’s “greenhouse gas” score considers how much a vehicle contributes to global warming via its full lifecycle emissions of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (NO2), and hydroflurocarbons (HFCs). The rating is mainly a function of a car’s gas mileage, but the analysis also looks at the fuel a car uses (gasoline, natural gas, diesel, ethanol) to factor in emissions.

Cars are given a score between 1 and 10, with 10 being the highest (the Prius solos at this rating) and 5 being not so hot (the Lincoln Town Car) and 3 (the GMC Sierra 15 gasoline model) being about as low as it goes. (The Sierra 15 jumps to a 6 on ethanol though.)

At the same site, the EPA chart also breaks out a column that considers just regulated tailpipe emissions — which doesn’t capture all the greenhouse gases and considers some outputs that aren’t greenhouse gases — giving each model an “air pollution score” as well. A diesel, say, might not score as well on this scale as it would on the greenhouse gas scale.

Interested in seeing just the EPA’s gas mileage ratings? Look to fueleconomy.gov, courtesy of the Department of Energy.

Meredith Henderson was on a mission, she wanted to make composting available where she lived. But she is among of the one-third of Americans who do not own their own homes.

“I do feel that apartment dwellers are often left out of the green movement because of the fact that their options are limited by their landlord’s willingness to create those options within their buildings,” said 25 year-old Henderson.

While living in Forest Hill in Los Angeles, Henderson attempted to gather signatures on a petition for her landlord to make composting available and got only one signature from her fellow residents. Disappointed with the lack of support, she left that apartment complex and started the Facebook group “Apartment Dwellers Go Green!!”

Henderson, who now lives in Culver City, says that she prefers to use a hand washer for her clothes and then line dry them. She drives a Prius and goes “dumpster diving” for treasures to reduce the build up in the land fills. She stimulates the local economy by purchasing food at the local food market, which cuts down on gas used to drive foods.

From her experiences she has learned that education for apartment dwellers is “just as important as when you are a landowner with more control.”

Shannon Erb is doing her share from her apartment in downtown Whitewater, Wisconsin. She wakes up early to take advantage of natural light and burns candles in the evening. In order to achieve a chemical free environment, she uses green cleaning products and grows indoor plants to purify the air.

“Everything counts to the movement,” said Erb.

Last summer, we reported on an effort by professors at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business to get the world to change the way it thinks about automotive fuel efficiency: Ranking cars in terms of miles per gallon, they explained, is much less helpful when it comes to making green choices than ranking the gallons required to drive a set number of miles.

At the time, professors Richard Larrick and Jack Soll were wishing automakers would start adding this rating to the vehicle stats on every car model they sell. Unsurprisingly, that hasn’t happened — so the scholars have taken matters into their own hands, developing an online tool set to help car shoppers do that work on their own.

The site offers three approaches to “gallons per mile” evaluation. Users can a) see a list of all new 2009 car models, ranked against each other, b) pick two, three, or four models and compare their efficiency side-by-side, or c) input a miles-per-gallon figure themselves. The last option might be the most useful, allowing owners to get a read on the cars they already drive (or might buy used), no matter how old they are.

While the logical basis for moving from MPG to GPM can be tricky to explain in a sentence or two — see this blog entitled “The Miles Per Gallon Illusion” for an in-depth but layman-friendly introduction — the researchers give their online calculator an easy hook by emphasizing the dollars involved in each efficiency leap. It may be hard to gauge how big a deal a certain amount of carbon emissions represents, they effectively say, but everybody can appreciate saving $1,200 in gas a year.

“This kind of calculator is exactly what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or Consumer Reports needs to adopt to help people think straight about fuel efficiency,” says Richard Larrick, who surely knows it would take an act of Congress (literally) to make automakers themselves post such data on window stickers.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

SAN MARTIN, CA — Thousands of lives could be saved in California by reducing the diesel fumes being pumped out from trucks and buses. New regulations are being considered to cut the cancer risk.

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