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A friend of mine likes to think of her self as quite "green". I tease her about her long haul holidays and business mileage ect.

Today she said how her 1.6 03 Corolla was greener than mine car because it was newer and I was better to run a newer car because the carbon building one was less that it takes to fuel an old one etc.

Now, I don't doubt (or should I?) that a newer car is less polluting than an older one, but is there, environmentally speaking, an optimum time to change to a newer car, with newer greener technology?

I'm not planning to change my car untill it is dead, but does scrapping a perfectly reliable 11 year old car for a new or newer car make sense environmentaly speaking? Surely it is better to maintain it religiously and run it into the ground. I'm thinking less resources and overall impact not just CO2.

There's no definative answer, just all sorts of wildly different figures about regarding the pollution of building a new car v. running an old one for longer.

For me thats one of the biggest flaws in the carbon end-of-the-world-know-it theory; if it's that important, we should have government approved and verified reliable information about the lifetime energy consumption of everything. Instead we have claims and counter claims and counter counter claims and so on, and what you choose to believe is probably based on what you want to believe. google "dust to dust hummer prius"

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Fear is a weapon of mass distraction

I very much doubt that less pollution is caused building modern cars than was produced building old cars.
Large amounts of plastic are in use in modern cars, and many different metal alloys.
It's all very well stating that town pollution is caused by vehicles, but a larger percentage of it is produced by industry....which includes offices and shops, as well as factories.

Graphs for NO in the air in three places: Luton, Bedford prebend st and backgound



Key: Mid Beds Sandy (Roadside) (red)
Bedford - Prebend Street (black)
N. Herts Breechwood Green (Background)(blue)

http://www.hertsbedsair.org.uk/hertsbeds/asp/Home.asp

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

I tend to believe that almost all the money spent on a car goes eventually to the fuel required to make it or its component materials. The wages earned will also go to buy fuel, holiday flights, . If you want to be green , hoard money!

The cheaper new cars cost £10,000, assuming around £1 a litre, 10 miles per litre= 45mpg could do 100,000 miles

Your old banger, which probobly manages better than 30mpg would need to do 300,000 miles to justify the swap on green justification.

My old banger has 90000 miles and still achieves 45mpg so there is no justification what so ever. All it needs is self cancelling indicators and a quieter water pump.

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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

It's a hugely complex equation and I'm not sure anyone will ever manage an absolutely definitive answer! Figures from the SMMT show (not surprisingly! ) that you're much better off in a new car and that the amount of pollution created by building a new cars is very easily offset in a few years by the savings in operating it. On the other hand, various environmental groups seem to have produced reports putting the balance much further towards keeping the older cars.

The most important questions are, perhaps, how far she drives and what she drives? I have a 1990, 3 litre, pre-cat, petrol car that does less than 5000 miles a year. It's highly unlikely that replacing it with a brand new 3 litre petrol car is likely to have much of an environmental effect for only 5000 miles a year! My NOx, CO and unburned hydrocarbn emissions will be massive compared to the new car, but my CO2 might well be very similar - maybe even better! The introduction of cats made cars a tiny bit thirstier than their non-cat equivalents. This has since been clawed-back with other improvements in efficiency, but without them, we'd be making less CO2 than with them! We keep getitng told that CO2 is the No. 1 enemy, but they seem to be here to stay.

In all honesty, I don't think it makes a great deal of difference. Older cars are generally in need of more maintenance and there are emissions associated with producing, transporting and fitting spare parts too. If we really want to make a difference, none of the options that are likely to really improve things are especially pallatable. These include buying smaller cars with lousy performance and little crash protection; or, indeed, not using ANY cars as much (or at all - if we want to get some serious environmental brownie points!

I'm not sure I'm in favour of the latter either. The "sackcloth-and-ashes" approach of simply not using cars any more will lead to a loss of incentive to develop cleaner technologies. We need to keep buying progresively greener cars so that the manufacturers start to chase that market. IF we just stop buying altogether, they won't have the incentive to develop.

They have no choice but to make cleaner, more economical vehicles. The various governments give them no choice.

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

However when those cleaner etc vehicles are hybrids we have problem. The eco-costs of hybrids over the life-cycle of the vehicle is debatable BUT worse, if most vehicles became hybrids we would run of lithium VERY fast.

I found a set of slides on the web from a lithium producers conference which indicated that at current prediction we would run out of economically available lithium in about 10 years. Apparently after that, we would have to extract it from seawater!

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I won't slave for beggar's pay,
likewise gold and jewels,
but I would slave to learn the way
to sink your ship of fools

To state the obvious: only if those vehicles use lithium-ion batteries There are other and better battery chemistries being developed.

I am more concerned about where the electricity to fill all those batteries is going to come from. And don't say wind power. I want to drive my car after a windless night.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Ahhhhh
That's where the greens philosophy comes in: You just connect your battery to another battery to recharge it.
And when the first battery is flat, you reconnect it to the other and BINGO !
The point about hybrids is not so much that they reduce pollution, but that they enable no-pollution town motoring. Which means that the 25% of pollution in towns caused by vehicles will be reduced....

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

Are there?

Of course the problem with "Better battery chemistries" is that any really good battery technology will run up against the terrestrial equivilant of "Jon's Law!"

IE Any really interesting battery technology will also make a pretty good bomb!

Personally, I reckon that the best solution is to aim to design a range of personal ground transportation vehicles that use liquid (at room tmepeature, with or without modest presure) chemical fuels to power heat engines.

The technolgy required to achive this is relativly simple, readily mass producable and does not require the use of rare or exotic materials (With all the geo-political implications that go with this!)

The trick is not to redesign the car, it is to redesign the fuel!

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

Zinc-Air. Two very common substances.
http://www.meridian-int-res.com/Projects/The_Zinc_Air_Solution.pdf

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

There are some things that are definite.

First, if you scrap cars long before they are knackered, you waste a lot of carbon. Taking a pathological case; if you buy a new car, and smash it straight into a lamppost at 60 mph, the wasted-carbon-ratio is 100%, i.e. all of the carbon used was emitted in manufacture, and none was used for any benefit to the owner.

Second, if you buy a new car, run it "forever" to go to work and take enjoyable runs in the country etc., the wasted-carbon-ratio asymptotically approaches 0%. In other words, the amount of carbon used just to make it becomes a progressively smaller component, and the amount of carbon used to transport the owner about becomes progressively larger. In other, other words – the longer you run it, the larger the benefit (relatively speaking).

Scrappage schemes are only “justified” politically. They can't be justified technically because the pace of improvement is too slow. Many 10 year old cars do (for example) 60 mpg. Look at the 206. It's all a swizz to bribe car firms to make cars nobody wants to buy at full “face value”.

Thanks for the replies. I like Moles comment about the complexity of the subject, and find it ironic how the "answer" is so simple

Not that I have any inclination to change cars, but if I did it would be because I wanted one, not because I needed one.

How much benefit can scrapping a genuinely perfectly reliable, 11 year old car that does (if I am carefull) 45 mpg be?

A new one is going to have to be seriously economical and clean to justify the change.

Some interesting ideas in there, a combination of zinc-air fuel cells and high output capacitor type batteries may work well if the science in this paper is correct.

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Driving fast is for a particular time and place, I can do it I just only do it occasionally because I am a gentleman.
- James May

Awwwwwww... here we go again!!!!

My 3 litre petrol car is 19 years old now and, I'm delighted to say, has just got another year's ticket, so unless I crash it, it's likely to reach at least 20 years old before it dies!

HOWEVER, I'd be kidding myself if I thought that it's doing the environment a favour!

It has no cat. It's CO2 emissions aren't bad (for what it is!) but it's other emissions will be TERRIBLE compared to a current car. It's aircon system still has plenty of that vicious ozone-eating R12 refrigerant in it and it's not as recyclable as a modern car. The idea that I'm somehow "doing the environment a favour" by keeping it on the road is LUDICROUS! The best I can say is that because it doesn't do much mileage, I'm probably not doing the environment "as much harm" as if it were my daily driver. Certainly, the more I use it, the larger the percentage of its total carbon emissions used to transport me becomes. BUT SO WHAT???! Using that argument, the best thing I can do for the environment is buy the thirstiest car imaginable and do lots of miles in it so that the percentage of it's total emissions that were caused by its manufacture go down compared to that cuased by its use!

Look, the plain fact is that there comes a time in every car's life when replacing it with an equivalent new model will be of overall benefit to the environment. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders puts this as a very short time...

...(can't think why!)...

...and you put it at a very long time. (an infinite number of years, in fact, if your argument is to be believed). The truth is going to lie somewhere between the two!

The researchers do seem to be independent of the zinc industry. Any air-xxx fuel cell has the obvious advantage of not needing to carry the oxidiser around. Current super-capacitors are usually based on some form of carbon, which is a common enough material, rather than exotic metals.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Which is a compelling argument for not scrapping it



I am not convinced of that (and not just because the C in my name stands for contrary ) It rather depends on how much you intend to drive it. In very simplistic terms: if the environmental cost of building a new car is X, and the environmental benefit of a new car is Y per mile, then the break even point is X/Y miles.

At the one extreme: if you only use the car for the ten mile trip to the supermarket every week there is no environmental benefit in updating it (though there an economic argument for getting rid and taking a taxi to the supermarket On the other extreme if intend to do 100K miles for the foreseeable future it would make environmental (but not economic) sense to change every time a significantly better vehicle comes on the market.

The problem is in determining accurate values for X and Y. And because of repair costs Y will tend to increase with the age of the vehicle

Personally I have an hatred, deeply rooted in my '50s Yorkshire childhood, of disposing of anything that still works which is why my attic is full of antiquated computers and CRT monitors.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Another aspect of this is that any sensible analysis must suppose that an old vehicle is replaced with a new vehicle of equivilant type!

Sure, there might be an enviromental advantage in replacing my LC with a Tata nano, but how big would the advantage be if I replaced it with a current LC??

None at all! Infact I suspect it would be a rather bad thing!

The most basic way of looking at it is cost. Its not perfect but generally it is a reasonable asessment of how much effort and resourses have to be put into owning and operating a product.

I am pretty sure that the cost spread over the next ten years of buying and running a new LC will be considerably greater than the cost of running my current 1994 one for another ten years .

Added to which there is the failure mode issue. On the 15 year old LC there are very few failure modes that might render the vehicle uneconomic to repair (BEB Failure is about the only one, and it is unfortuanatly an issue, but an avoidable one) Autoboxes sometimes have to be ovrhauled but they are not too bad a job.

I strongly suspect that there are many more things on the more modern vehicle that could go wrong sufficiently expensivly to render it a scrapper! And that sort of thing bothers me a lot!

(I saw a customer recently who had two BMW's, one 15 years old and a new one, We got chatting about this "Failure mode" issue and I surprised him by sugesting that, were I a betting man, I would put my money on the old one as being the most likly to still be a runner in ten years time!)

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

I feel just the same with my 1991 Golf GTI. Ok it only does 30mpg but, on my mileage if I got something that did 50mpg - which I doubt is possible with my motoring - I would save less than £250 a year. Even allowing an extra £500 a year in maintenance it would be many years before I could repay the £15,000 that a new car would cost

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Let's stay focused. Add up all the other emissions, multiply them by 2, 10, 100 etc. and one way or the other (politically, technologically ...), the big issue would _still_ be carbon. That's what it is all about now. It's not about the other things, no matter how TERRIBLE. And scrappage doesn't add up in that regard - sorry, Mole, but it makes no sense to run factories to replace good stuff you intentionally ruin because it is not "new enough". Such boneheaded ideas just illustrate what a screwed up world it has become.

PS: here's an idea for you- give them a no-scrappage subsidy! Then people get to drive nice, new, "fuel efficient" cars, while bottom feeders like us are also happy. But that would be too radical, for Secretary of State for Business, Innovation & Skills, Lord President of the Council, Master-of-all-he-surveys, Rt. Hon. Lord Peter Moron-Mandelson.