An American firm called Elio Motors is introducing a new city car concept designed to be an economical city runabout that is cheap to buy and cheap to run. To put the car’s environmental-friendliness into perspective, they are comparing it to… well, cow farts. Apparently, the Elio emits less CO2 than a year’s worth of one cow’s farts. Who figured that out? And how? And what was his job description?  

Elio is not a car as such, but a three-wheeler with two skinny wheels up front and a larger on out back. It’s got a tiny internal combustion engine with an average fuel consumption of 84 mpg. Driven 15,000 miles annually, the vehicle will save its owner $1,500 in fuel costs.

The thing is, who is going to want to drive such a miserable-looking thing which is now also associated with cow farts for 15,000 miles every year? Not even the most hard-core hippies, who probably inhale cow farts as a sort of drug when they run out of weed, have such low level of self-respect to be OK with being seen in this thing.

Still, the company’s CEO Paul Elio has high hopes for his creation, planning to launch it in 2015 with a base price of $6,800… air-freshener not included!

“I’ll admit, it’s not the most conventional measure for environmental efficiency,” Elio said of the cow comparison. “But, when you realize that we are more environmentally friendly than something found in nature every day, we are clearly on the right path. The internal combustion engine is going to be part of the transportation industry for many years into the future. The key will be for companies such as Elio Motors to come up with revolutionary vehicle designs to use existing technology in a more Earth-friendly way.”