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My guess based on various snippets is that more than half of the lifetime energy consumption of a vehicle takes place in manufacture so...

The best way to reduce CO2 emissions resulting from motor vehicles is to make them last longer.

Discuss.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Most people in the food chain won't want to hear that - including the big boyz toyz customer!

The dust to dust calculation report that the abd have on their website is very interesting and worth a read if you have time (!) They are working on doing a european version. The people that did it aren't paid for by anyone and just sell the report later so there is less of the figure fiddling that tends to happen in scientific research.

There is also some interesting stuff going on at the moment about how cosmic rays affect cloud cover which in turn affect climate. It would make sense that stronger sunshine led to more clouds to shield the earth from the greater amount of sunshine.

Car manufacturers would go bust if cars lasted for ages and didn't need lots of expensive servicing and maintenance! Even now Ford/GM are in some trouble. Only Toyota and BMW are really doing well. The euro emissions legislation is quite tight but I suspect manufacturers have the knowledge to make cars much, much more fuel efficient but governments rely on the revenue so they daren't release a car which did 60 mpg and 0-60 in 5 seconds as I suspect that is well within the realms of possibility. I don't bother about that and drive around in ancient cars so I only really have higher maintenance costs and higher fuel costs.

Some of the environmental impact could be offset by the use of biofuels which, if they were from waste matter, would be about as sustainable as you could get.

I don't know about that - if life is longer, depreciation is slower and higher specification toyz come into purchasing range.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Anything beyond 60MPG is slamming against the wall of diminishing returns.

Above that the engine is not producing enough "Waste" heat to keep it up to temperature and heat/demist the vehicle interior in cold wether.

The Rover 75 Diesel achieves about this on a good run and requres an additional fuel burning heater (Webasto) in the cooling system to keep the water hot!

BatteryEV's are liky to be of limited usefulness (In the UK anyway, LA is a difernet situation all together) for the same reason

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

In an average vehicle considerably more that half the whole of life environmental impact is from creation and disposal (even Archbigot Sian Berry admits that!) However, to have maximum benefit vehicles must be built to last. Unfortunately, the average eurobox is built to fall apart in under ten years of normal use. Even modern 4x4s have partially lost the durability of old.

To further reduce the environmental impact of a vehicle, you could run it on carbon-neutral fuel (such as vegetable oil). Many older diesel engines can run on "Tesco basic" vegetable oil with little or no modifications in warm weather, and with only a preheater (perhaps running on dino-diesel until up to temperature) all year in UK.

Ironically, probably the environmentally least harmful cars are older diesel 4x4s run on vegetable oil - and yet that is exactly what the government et al seem hell-bent on stopping! They are durable (e.g. over 70% of every Land Rover ever built is still in service) and run on carbon-neutral fuel.

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Will

There is also the point, though, that much of modern "prosperity" is based on a merry-go-round of people being persuaded to renew goods well before they have reached the end of their economic life, and thus providing employment to others to make new ones. If you reduce demand by getting people to keep goods longer, it will cause an economic depression.

And most modern cars become uneconomic to repair well before it becomes physically impossible to repair them.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

I don't see that at all. Suppose cars lasted twice as long. Car factories only need to produce half as many, it's true. But the rest of the factory capacity is still there and the cash is still in the consumer's pocket. The trick then is to use the extra factory capacity to make things that people want to buy (and can now afford). Although of course if you do this perfectly the (so called) environmental benefit is lost.

Would I be right in thinking that reduced energy consumption throughout the economy would necessarily lead to a depression? Everything downsizes?

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

But the same smoke-and-mirrors trick applies to pretty much all durable manufactured goods. "Cars" are simply a subset of all goods.


I don't think that reduced energy consumption would, as energy production employs relatively few people anyway, and any reduction wouldn't in practice be catastrophic.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Quite right - although if they came out with cars that lasted twice as long, then the price would be double. What would actually happen is that along would come another "must have" invention that the saved energy would be used on.

Yes I think reduced energy use would cause a depression. Absolutely everything we do uses energy, so unless we went back to sitting in caves & catching our own food we're going to continue needing more and more. Unless of course we reduce the population dramatically.

Although I'm sick to death of the "green" bandwagon, without a doubt we need alternatives sources of energy.

Most of our energy comes from fossil fuels, it's quite obvious that if we continue burning the planet one day there won't be a lot left! I can't for the life of me understand why we are fannying around worrying about 4x4s or fining me because I didn't recycle the tin my baked beans came in when what they should be doing is throwing up as many nuclear power stations as possible. I don't get the "what will we do with the waste" argument either, that doesn't seem to come into it when they're building nuclear bombs does it?

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Wake me up when the revolution starts
STOP the Toll Tax http://www.traveltax.org.uk

I don't know about catastrophic, but the more I think about it the more convinced I am that 'carbon reduction' will significantly damage the economy.

This leads to a fifth question for the global warming doomsayers:

1) Is the world warming?
2) Is man responsible?
3) Can we do anything about it?
4) If we don't will the environment be worse?
5) If the environment would be worse, would it not be better to build a stronger economy to deal with the problems?

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

The reason cars are not maintained for ever is the cost of stocking every part and the diversity of cars and thier components.

If you could standardise the components more then we could maintain them or upgrade them.

For instance ISO slots to take this years gizmo
making a wiper motor/door mirrors/air bag controll unit that fits 200 models of car. bolt on air con kits,

I have been restoring the TR4 and very little energy has been used or materials. It has only beeen possible because of the common components like a lucas dr3 wiper motor, a smiths speedo etc. try doing that with todays cars!

Broadly speeking a car does 75% of its milage in the first 4 years then the car transfers to a low milage user.

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Speed limit sign radio interview. TV Snap Unhappy
“It has never been the rule in this country – I hope it never will be - that suspected criminal offences must automatically be the subject of prosecution” He added that there should be a prosecution: “wherever it appears that the offence or the circumstances of its commission is or are of such a character that a prosecution in respect thereof is required in the public interest”
This approach has been endorsed by Attorney General ever since 1951. CPS Code

Hmmmm!

Lots of thoughts here.

1. I'll have a look at that ABD thing sometime. I've heard the "building cars causes much more pollution than driving them" argument before and I'm not sure I believe it to be honest.

2. I don't believe for one second that manufacturers wouldn't make cars more economical if they could! You really need to see the lengths they go to to get another 0.5MPG on their consumption figures or a couple of grammes per kilometre less CO2 - especially if it puts them into a different tax band!

3. It's prefectly true that internal combustion engines need to reject heat to work. Most (if not all) Euro IV diesels are now so efficient that they struggle to keep the occupants warm in winter so they have little diesel fired heaters which burn diesel from the tank and dump the heat into the cooling system to keep it hot enough for the heater to work!

4. The average car gets scrapped at (I believe) about 14 years these days. That figure has gone UP not down. It's a myth that "they don't build them like they used to"! The major manufacturers I deal with work on about 15 years lifespan for the purposes of the End-Of-Life-Vehicles Directive. This also will make the manufacturer pick up the cost of processing the dead vehicle when it is scrapped -which provides them with another incentive to make them last longer.

5. I think people replace cars for a whole load of reasons other than being too expensive to repair or terminal rust. Safety features is a good one. As they get another EuroNCAP star or another passive safety add-on the consumer feels that he will die a horrible death if he doesn't drive round one of the new ones! Most manufacturers recommend changing all the airbags and belt pretensioners between 10 and 15 years. That seems to write most 10-15 year old cars off (never mind the rust)! I think the reason 4x4s are not seen as lasting as long these days is because ordinary cars ARE lasting longer!

6. The idea of being able to afford more "toys" by not changing car as often only works for as long as the toys on offer are current. 10 years ago, sat-nav didn't exist in cars. Who knows what they'll invent in the next 10!

This was mentioned on Newsnight last night, with typically contradictory points being made.

First the "dust to dust" comparison was made between a Prius and a big 4x4, demonstrating that the latter is about a quarter of the total energy cost.

But then they interviewed a guy from (I think) Honda, who cheerfully said that c.90% of the energy usage was fuel consumption, therefore the "right" thing to do was to chop your old car in for one of their super-efficient new ones.

In typical BBC style this was accepted without question, not withstanding the fact that this claim - by an interested party - clearly contradicted that which they'd only just established as scientific fact!

My personal view is that we need to be very careful about where these "dust to dust" figures are coming from and how they are validated. It's just too damned easy for people with an axe to grind to quote whichever biased figures best support their case.

My own (anecdotal) experience is that cars are indeed lasting much longer than they used to, especially the "quality" ones. I routinely see 10 year old Beemers for sale with 200,000 miles on the clock and still fetching reasonable values which is incredible when you think what the realistic lifespan of (say) a Ford Cortina or a Vauxhall Viva was - considerably less than half I'd say.

As regards the "consumer society" angle, there are far more factors involved than simply cars "wearing out". People change cars because their aspirations change, the same way that they move up the housing market. Indeed, their continues to be massive demand for new houses despite the fact that not many old ones get "scrapped"!

Indeed, when you think about it any increase in car life can only have a transient effect on the demand for new ones. Even if cars lasted 100 years, once the first batch of these had done so they'd still need replacing, so car manufacture would (eventually) have to revert back up to current levels. As a worked example, if manufacturers suddenly doubled the design life of all new cars tomorrow, all the cars already produced would be unaffected by this and still need replacing as and when they wore out. Thus the transient drop in demand wouldn't even happen for whatever the current lifespan is anyway.

My feeling is that the "best" thing for the environment would be something subtly different. Instead of increasing the life of new cars, invest in improving the life of ones already in the market. Improve maintenance, availability of spares, and invest in reconditioning older cars that are only scrap for financial reasons, and actually still have considerable life left. Now this would hit new car sales, but on the other hand it would create work in the service sector of the industry so the total economic cost wouldn't be huge.

It would certainly be a much more sensible version of "recycling" than all the nonsense we are getting foisted upon us today. Imagine if you could go and buy (say) a 1995 model car, but sold as fully recondiitioned and warrantied as for a new one, and at a third of the cost...

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CSCP Latin for beginners...
Ticketo ergo sum : I scam therefore I am!

The other problem with making cars last too long is that they may meet some other demise such as an accident or fire and theft.
All the extra energy used to make it last longer is then lost.

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Speed limit sign radio interview. TV Snap Unhappy
“It has never been the rule in this country – I hope it never will be - that suspected criminal offences must automatically be the subject of prosecution” He added that there should be a prosecution: “wherever it appears that the offence or the circumstances of its commission is or are of such a character that a prosecution in respect thereof is required in the public interest”
This approach has been endorsed by Attorney General ever since 1951. CPS Code

I think I agree with JT's notion of trying to make cars last longer by making them cheaper / easier to service.

10 years ago, scrapyards were full of cars with no floors in and no sills on. These days, there aren't nearly so many rot boxes in the yards. The "profile" of the average scrapper is now changing to being a perfectly serviceable car with an "engine management" fault. (leaving aside accident damage).

I think that the response of the major manufacturers to "pro-competition" decisions in Brussles whereby pretty much anyone can service anything has been to make the cars so complex and the diagnostic equipment so expensive that people are still (effectively) forced to go to an authorised dealer anyway. On top of that increasingly long warranties (like 7 years on a Kia ) also tend to keep the punter coming back to the main dealership.