Hi guys
>> production of each automobile and the subsequent scrapping of
>> most cars over 20 years old consumes massive amounts of energy
>> and generates mass amounts of pollution during the process.
>
>Dean, do you by any chance have any numbers at all to back this up ? I'd
>love to know just how much energy, pollution and petroleum (for plastics) it
>takes to build a new car today.
>
>Randall
>
Being both an old car nut and a bit of a "greeny" myself (my commuter car is
a '73 VW Karmann Ghia converted to electric power... it gets about 2.5 miles
per kwh), I thought I should weigh in on the old-car-vs-new-car pollution
issue. Dean's suggestion is echoed all over the internet on websites belonging
to enviro-activist groups, bicycling advocates, etc. Many of them don't give a
source; but when they do, the one they usually cite is a German report entitled
"Oeko-bilanz eines autolebens", or approximately "Eco-analysis of the life
cycle of a car," produced by a forecasting institute in Heidelberg in the
1990's. I haven't been able to get my hands on the actual report (and anyway I
can't read German), but if you Google the title you can find some good
summaries.
Essentially, the authors consider a typical 1.5-ton car produced in Germany
in the 1990's that gets 10L/100km (23.5 mpg) and lasts for 130,000 km (80,600
miles) before it is scrapped. In terms of cubic meters of air pollution, it
turns out that the impact of refining materials, building the car, and
ultimately scrapping it accounts for about 60% of the total "cradle-to-grave"
impact (including driving). In other words, production and disposal together
(but mostly production) produce about 1.5 times as much air pollution as
driving the car 80,600 miles.
Now, if modern cars got better fuel economy than old cars and lasted longer,
one could argue that the initial production impact should wash out over time.
But the truth is quite often the opposite: Average fuel economy for all 2004
vehicles in the US was 20.8 mpg
(www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/29/tech/main614703.shtml). Many (most?) of
our Triumphs can beat this figure; certainly there are few that are far below
it. And because of suppliers like TRF, Moss Motors, and VB, the parts are
available to make our cars last indefinitely into the future. In comparison,
the immense complexity of modern cars makes it far less likely that all their
parts will still be available down the road... it's just not economically
feasible for a supplier to stock so many model-specific bits, when there are so
few people likely to be doing a nuts-and-bolts restoration of, say, a 2004 "New
Beetle" in 30 years (no offense to VW).
So that's where I stand. I recycle whenever possible, I hope some day to
own a solar-powered home, and I hug trees, but I intend to keep driving cars
from the 60's and 70's until the day I die (presumably behind the wheel of one
of them).
-Nick Wolf
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