Keeping what you have: the truly green cars
Cars for Clunkers brought up an old debate: whether it’s greener to swap into a new, cleaner-burning car or to keep what you have for another decade. The question has no absolute right answer; it depends largely on what you have and what you’re moving into, and how you drive. For a New York City taxi driver, giving up a Crown Victoria for a Prius is probably indeed the green choice. For the rest of us, it’s fuzzier.
Take the great IT trainer Bob O’Neill. He has been driving a 1986 Dodge Daytona for many years and 296,000 miles (though it wasn’t his primary daily driver the whole time). That car still gets 32 mpg on the highway, which is more than many new cars get. With its single fuel injector it doesn’t burn as cleanly as many new cars, but it still gets better mileage than a typical replacement car would, so the overall level of pollution is probably lower. But one has to go further than just looking at gas mileage.
I was trained in a systems approach which considers everything from before you start to after you finish. It’s the difference between the Daimler-Benz cost cutting approach used at Chrysler from 2000-2008 (order the suppliers to cut prices) and the Chrysler approach used from 1994-1999 (ask the suppliers how they can save Chrysler money by changing designs or processes, then share the proceeds.)
The systems approach, which seeks all inputs and outputs, also shows that junking a Dodge Daytona to buy a Prius is not as “green” for most people as keeping that Daytona on the road. (Note my weasel disclaimer, “for most people.” That excludes special cases — like New York City taxi drivers, whose high use and particular conditions probably make the Prius the cheapest and lowest-impact car; and junking their Crown Vics was probably quite “green” indeed, and most likely the fuel savings easily paid any expenses including extra repair costs.)
Every car and truck takes a huge amount of energy to build, as well as tons of raw materials. Simply running the factory consumes huge amounts of energy with heating and air conditioning, welders, robots, lighting, the energy used in refining metals and creating plastic, and the oil diverted to creating the plastic. That’s not counting energy used in dealing with junked cars.
I understand, though I do not support, “cash for clunkers” programs where they crush vehicles with poor mileage and replace them with somewhat better ones. It might “pay,” energy-and-pollution-wise, over the lifetime of the car, though perhaps not for the expected remaining life of the old one.
But for cars that already have acceptable mileage, keeping them on the road is well worth any marginal levels of extra pollution they may emit, and chances are they would be replaced by cars that use more gas, not less (Cash for Clunkers, incidentally, excluded cars with decent mileage). That has been the trend in the United States — gas mileage rose dramatically in the 1980s and early 1990s and then fell. So keeping some of the old cars on the road cannot help but be a net gain.
Regardless of pollution and global warming arguments, here in the United States, we use far too much oil for our economy and national security. We have massive trade deficits from this and other wasteful practices which slowly suck the life out of our economy, and put us in debt to some very bad people.
When the Saudi Arabian terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon our leaders did not even mention Saudi Arabia, blaming it on Iraq. Quite aside from the flood of Saudi money pumped into both parties’ political campaigns, we do not dare offend the Saudis when they have such a hold on our economy. (Just as we cannot dare offend China, which responds to a gentle poke with a hard push.)
So let’s cheer on those people in the Allpar 200,000 mile club, even the ones with 440-powered Dodge D200 trucks. They’re not just preserving our history; they might even be saving energy and helping the nation.
