LCA

Check out Toyota's Life Cycle Analysis data for the Prius here. The site is in Japanese, but some more insight can be gained from using Google's translator. Not surprisingly, the Prius seems to come out ahead (if I'm reading things correctly). Imagine that, Toyota puts positive environmental data about the Prius on their website. Also, the Toyota data is discussed on Autoblog here, though I have found the commenter who introduces the data to be militantly pro-hybrid. Perhaps the commenter is militant for a good reason, and perhaps Toyota is right. But an impartial third party study is a requirement for me to fully lose my skepticism.