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You can go design your own Prius
http://www.toyota.com/prius-hybrid

More info on the Project Better Place swapping station:
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/2745/69/

Google's Blog Post on the Carbon Impact of searches
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/energy-and-internet.html
Plenty of good news today my fellow EcoGeeks. You can now design your own 2010 Prius, Better Place is testing out their battery swapping facility, and I've got good news for those of you who are worried about the environmental impact of your Google searching.

While you, like me, might be pretty excited about the new Honda Insight, the hybrid for everyone, the 2010 Prius is definitely the EcoGeekier way to go. With significantly better mileage than the Insight at 54 miles per gallon, an optional solar roof and as many energy saving measures as Toyota could cram into the now slightly larger car, Toyota has maintained hybrid superiority. Of course this all means that you're going to be paying a little extra. You can now go to toyota.com/prius-hybrid and build your own 3rd generation 2010 Prius.

The car is, of course, gorgeous and as you point and click your way northward of that $22,000 base price you will discover why people are excited about the Insight. All of those fancy options that the Prius has, it's just so hard to resist and then suddenly you're looking at a $30,000 car. But if you're in the market for a green car don't let that hold you back. Of the cars that we've got available today this is probably the one you want to go with.

Of the cars that will be available tomorrow, project Better Place has some interesting ideas about how they'll be powered. Better Place wants to take the inconvenience of the long charge times of electric vehicles out of the picture and they want to do it with battery swapping stations. You just drive into this thing that's kind of like a car wash and the battery gets sucked out of your car and then a new one that's fully charged gets put right back in there.

The idea is that the process only takes about two minutes which is about how much time it takes to fill up a gas tank. And this first demonstration of how Better Place's battery swapping stations will work is a pretty big step forward for the company. Of course there is huge debate over whether this is actually a good way to power the electric vehicles of the future but for now I will leave that debate for the comments.

And finally my EcoGeeky friends, you may have heard that Google searches are horrible for the environment. All of those servers humming away, indexing the entire internet, shuffling through terabytes of data per second. In response to the controversy, at first Google was like "Yeah. It takes electricity to do these things." But now the mainstream media has continued to cover this lame ass story, Google put together a lit of things and quantified how many searches worth of carbon impact each of these things had.

A glass of orange juice: about 1,000 Google searches worth of carbon. A cheeseburger: about 15,000 searches worth of Carbon. So my EcoGeek friends, if you want to feel not guilty about your Google searching, just forgo a cheeseburger, one cheeseburger, and you'll be good.