Another scam using the "global warning" fallacy
The most environmentally friendly cars are older cars, as 1/2 the total energy consumption is used during construction.
But then again the government could have come out with something realy stupid, like demonizing and taxing 4WDs to death, then giving many £millions to a foreign company to build more of them......
MVP
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Exactly MVP. Since I did the plugs on my dads car fuel encomeny has increased by at least 20% if the government really wanted to clean up cars emissions then complusery servicing would be a start.
My dads is 13 years old, its not exactly been well cared for and touch wood although silly things have gone wrong its been very very reliable, it never fails to start. In the 90;s they convinced people to buy new cars due to improved safety and reliability but in the past 10 years although safety has improved not much else has, I woudl suspect due to even more complicity modern cars are not even as reliable.
Once car manufacturers have cracked fuel cell technology in mass produced cars then I think we will see a sudden demand for new cars. At the moment though as longs as people have a reliable car people don't want to change.
It is also interestign to see a lot of local taxi firms have quite a large petrol fleet these days,
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My Golf MkIV 1.8T back in 1999 had CO 2 emissions around 189g/km I think - probably a bit less. The replacement Passat was also a 1.8T and emitted 192g/km of CO 2 . I remember because I choose it for the lower emissions before company cars were taxed on CO 2 .
Fast forward to now and emissions are a lot lower - the equivalent car is probably a 1.4TSI. But as has been said, the older car's affect on the environment was also due to manufacture and there's plenty of life in them yet.
Having said that, you probably would not be scrapping a ten year old Golf GTI 1.8T for the £2k. You'd find an old banger somewhere and use one that is really worthless.
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I may have this wrong, but doesn't a £2K price floor actually encourage owners of older cars
to keep them going? Since the bangernomics principle is to (very approximately) only spend up to a certain percentage of the market price, it may mean that previously uneconomic cars will be fettled, by those not intending to buy new, in the knowlwdge that their equity will never drop below ~£2K.
Law of unintended consequences?
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.. doesn't a £2K price floor actually encourage owners of older cars .. >>
Agreed. I think that while the scheme is operating, it will effectively put a floor on the price of bangers at around, say, £1500 or so. *
[ * = to make it worthwhile for example for me to buy a banger at £1500 so that I can use it to buy a new car at discount of £2000, assuming that the £2000 voucher counts towards a discounted/negotiated price prior to disclosing that I have the £2000 voucher, if you get my drift!].
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This is a daft idea because it ignores the amount of energy required to produce and ship the new car.
Cradle to cradle energy use is the only true measure of a car's carbon footprint.
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Cradle to cradle energy use is the only true measure of a car's carbon footprint.
I'd love to see the Prius's true carbon footprint using these (absolutely correct) criteria.
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My car will have caused a lot more emissions than if I got something like a Toyota Avensis I guess. My Mazda6 had to be shipped from Hiroshima. I should feel a little guilty but I liked it more than the Toyota. I could try to defend the decision based on saving money - but I'd have been better off with an Avensis T4 2.2d.... but I didn't like it.
Maybe the answer for all the fields full of cars are some short term lease deals. Someone benefits and pays something. It then ends up in the used car market around the time we hope the economy picks up.
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"My car (from Japan) will have caused a lot more emissions than if I got something like a Toyota Avensis (from UK)......"
I wonder if that's the case? 10 cars travelling, say 300 miles, on a transporter or 8000 cars travelling 13,000* miles from Japan on a ship. I assume the industry has some sort of "greenometer" or carbon-miles or somesuch per vehicle?
*calculated using the Google Earth path facility and winding my way from Japan to the Suez canal, Med and to Southampton. It was strangely therapeutic and no, I didn't have anything better to do.
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It was then delivered to a Leicester dealership and then via a two car transporter to me in the North West. It will have passed Derby on the way, home to Toyota UK production. Not as green as the Toyota but not as boring either ;-)
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This is a daft idea because .... >>
Indeed. Scores of posts along those lines in the Gruniad:
www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/12/greenwa...s
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/10/car-s...s
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It's not often I find myself agreeing with George Monbiot (or other Grauniad-sponsored AGW nonsense), but I was pleased to see him quote the 19-year optimum lifespan for cars. Now, if he would only accept that CO2 is not a major greenhouse gas and that climate change is not all (or even much) of our doing, I might agree with him all the time!
I bet he doesn't read this: wattsupwiththat.com/
Edited by J Bonington Jagworth on 17/03/2009 at 23:24
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Our 16 year old Peugeot 106 has at least another 10 years life left. It is worth £5k to us...
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If it really makes economic and environmental sense to scrap and replace old cars, why not everything else too? £200 to scrap your old cooker, £200,000 to scrap your old house?
Or £20000000000000000000000 to scrap your old government.
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Or £20000000000000000000000 to scrap your old government
Obviously factoring in the index-linked pensions there CP.
It is indeed a curious state of affairs - we've gone so far down the road of moral & social corruption, that the only 'cure' for our debt-junkie society is, er, more of the same.
The true definition of corruption is the stage that's reached where the moral compass is so distorted that it can only point in the wrong direction.
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I guess the Euro V standard cleans up particulates in the exhaust, no bad thing, and mpg has improved too. All good stuff, but hardly worth canning a perfectly serviceable car for. Politically-motivated bonkers. Strange this scheme was never an environmental imperative when sales were good, and the tax reforms were done, eh?
my eleven-year-old averages a tad under 50 mpg, and has under 60k total on the clock- should be good for the same again (miles anyway, not sure about years!)
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The government have done everything they could over the last few years to demonize motoring.
Now car sales have fallen off a cliff, they should be happy as this is the one thing they have succeeded in
Why do they suddenly want to reverse their policy of driving cars off the road?, or was it all just a scam to increase taxes?
MVP
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"..was it all just a scam to increase taxes?"
That is a rhetorical question, I take it? :-)
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"mpg has improved"
But not nearly as much as it would have if catalysers weren't mandatory! One of the few things I ever agreed with Mrs T about was her resistance to their compulsion by the EU, when similar ends could have been achieved by more research into efficient combustion. After all, she had done some chemistry.
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if catalysers weren't mandatory!
Is it possible to make some noise about this? After all, in this day and age, one would've thought measures to save fuel would be at the top of Gov't desires. How much would be saved in terms of cost and CO2 emissions?
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Maybe im a bit thick, but wouldnt it be a better idea to give grants to people to retro-fit CATs and have their cars modified for lower emissions if they already have one - must be better for the enviroment to modify cars that already exist rather than make whole new ones?
I mean, if my Charade could be fitted with a new more efficient engine compatible with existing running gear and it was paid for by a £2k grant from the government, id be well up for that. It would actually MAKE SENSE. In four years time, my car, which has emissions of only 114 grams, will be ten years old - but its still very clean running.
Even now compared to current small cars, it has great emissions and was one of the pinoeers of the sub 120 catagory.
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Cats are destroyed by backfires so have to run extra rich when cold = more fuel
Un Leaded petrol = 5% less fuel economy = more fuel
AC = more fuel
Extra weight for ABS, electric windows, crash protection etc = more fuel
speed bumps = more acceleration & breaking = more fuel
Speed cameras = more acceleration & breaking = more fuel
DPFs = more fuel
What we realy need is to go back to early 1980s style roads and cars, but modern engines that don't use the above encumberances :)
MVP
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wouldnt it be a better idea to give grants to people to retro-fit CATs and have their cars modified for lower emissions
The point is that catalytic converters fitted mean more fuel used and more greenhouse gasses, and that they are counter-productive from this perspective.
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"Is it possible to make some noise about this?"
I will if you will! Glad you feel the same way, FT. I'd be interested to know the actual benefits, too - AFAIK, cats just convert some of the CO to CO2 (!) but only when they've warmed up properly, which takes anything up to 20 minutes. In the meantime, everything is worse, because you're burning more fuel unnecessarily, so the net effect is that there is no overall benefit. Law of unintended consequences and all that...
I'm not sure if a retuned cat-less engine can meet the current CO limits, although I suspect it might, as I doubt that MOT stations have the time or inclination to warm up the cat properly before every test
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