Environmental Question

[PaulT]

When changing cars, is it better for the environment to:

a. Buy a new Aygo

b. Buy a 10-year-old Supra/Soarer/Chaser/Aristo etc.

Show your working when answering :D

Has anybody seen any research into this?

Paul.

[reece]

How much CO2 does a 10-year-old Supra/Soarer/Chaser/Aristo pump out? How economical are they? Bit of a no brainer really! What is better for the environment = better for your pocket

Keep in mind petrol is going up 2p in September and another 1p in April, VAT will be going back to 17.5% plus an other increases if the price of oil goes up :( The sensible person would be thinking of a car with £35 a year road tax or lower and something with over 50mpg just so they aren’t priced off the road.

[Bizarra]

No working shown Just my preference, every time.

Plan B I always look for a Golden Oldie with low mileage & in as good condition as can reasonably be expected.

I'm on my 2nd Corolla Executive GL with 132k on the clock, now. Gives me no trouble [touch wood] 1st turn of the key & she starts every time. Checked oil yesterday & not a drop used. Mind you, I did add the Wynn's equivalent of STP a couple of months ago

If anything major went wrong , I'd look for another, though they are getting scarce now. She only cost me £400 + import tax, is 18 y.o. & I've had her for over 5 years.

[Bibbs]

Dust to dust ..

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg1902...odust-cost.html

For an example.

I think it's something like 60% of the cars Energy take up is in manufacture, and that's assuming something like 100k miles in a lifetime.

[toyboata]

The problem is...

You could buy a new aygo for £8700 (round figures)

Or you could buy a ten year old car, like a corsa for £700

The £8,000 "saving" on buying an old car would pay for a enough petrol/insurance/tax/tyres etc to last YEARS.

Therefore i would argue it is more cost effective to buy an old cheap car and spend the money on running it.

However, you have an older car, that is not as safe, "good looking", Economical etc etc.

Or You could spend £8.7K on a new aygo - then have ultra low running costs....but suffer the cost of depreciation.

I think overall...assuming the old car didnt have too many expensive repairs - the old car would be a hell of a lot cheaper to run.

Matt

[toyboata]

oh and the other part of the question.... Environment.

This is questionable as well.

Clearly, the newer aygo is more friendly while running it...lower CO2 emissions.

BUT - some argue that the manufacture of the car should be taken into consideration.

So...if you bought an old car you save CO2...

On the manufacture of 1 new car (as it wouldnt need manufacturing)

On the scrapping of the old car (as scrapping produces CO2)

But overall...A newer car is better imo.

I think we face a problem we are not targeting...

If we had 100% electric cars -- yes the car emits no CO2 - but the production of that electricity usually does...powerstations.

So our whole infrastructure needs reinventing - which will cost LOADS and will take AGES.

Plus most people dont like some of the changes this will bring...so more problems.

[Bibbs]

Didn't bother reading the above as it said "CO2" and we all know that CO2 isn't the worse green house gas for effects, the fact levels are rising and global temperature is staying stable, and the fact it's plant food, all mean it's a null point.

CO2 isn't an environmental issue. It's a way of taxing people.

The mining of parts for batteries required for eletric cars are more damaging than the tiny bits of poison that come out my exhaust.

It's why I love revving the %$( out my diesel when next to a prius. I'm helping plants, you are poisoning the environment.

[toyboata]

Do those prius batterys damage the environment when it comes to recycling/disposing of them!

[Leeky]

B

Simply as its better to the environment for us to get as much usage out of the vehicles already in circulation than to manurfacture new vehicles.

Even the most polluting cars im sure would do less damage to the environment if we were to continue using them, verses scrapping them and building a new car.

[Bibbs]

Do those prius batterys damage the environment when it comes to recycling/disposing of them!

For starters they are mined in Russia, shipped to Japan for assembly, then shipped to the US to put in the cars.

Then what are you going to do with all those chemicals once your car dies in 5 years?

They are just fancy laptop batteries, and how long do they last being used every day?

Make things more efficient - yes.

Make things appear more efficient via adverts, but are actually a nightmare - no.

Just have a read about the mines for the meterials to make a catalitic convertor. It's scary.

[Bizarra]

Like most hybrids, the Prius relies on two engines - one, a conventional 76-horsepower

gasoline power plant, and a second, battery-powered, that kicks in 67 more horses. Most

of the gas is consumed as the car goes from 0 to 30, according to alarmed Canadian

environmentalists, who say Toyota's touting of the car's green appeal leaves out a few

pertinent and disturbing facts.

The nickel for the Battery, for instance, is mined in Sudbury, Ontario, and smelted at

nearby Nickel Centre, just north of the province's massive Georgian Bay.

Toyota buys about 1,000 tons of nickel from the facility each year, ships the nickel to

Wales for refining, then to China, where it's manufactured into nickel foam, and then

onto Toyota's Battery plant in Japan.

That alone creates a globe-trotting trail of carbon emissions that ought to seriously

concern everyone involved in the fight against global warming. All told, the start-tofinish

journey travels more than 10,000 miles - mostly by container ship, but also by

diesel locomotive.

But it's not just the clouds of greenhouse gases generated by all that smelting, refining

manufacturing and transporting that worries green activists. The 1,250-foot-tall

smokestack that spews huge puffs of sulphur dioxide at the Sudbury mine and smelter

operation has left a large swath of the surrounding area looking like a surrealistic scene

from the depths of hell.

On the perimeter of the area, skeletons of trees and bushes stand like ghostly sentinels

guarding a sprawling wasteland. Astronauts in training for NASA actually have practiced

driving moon buggies on the suburban Sudbury tract because it's considered a duplicate

of the Moon's landscape.

"The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants, and the soil slid

down off the hillside," David Martin, Greenpeace's energy coordinator in Canada, told

the London Daily Mail.

"The solution they came up with was the Superstack. The idea was to dilute pollution, but

all it did was spread the fallout across northern Ontario," Martin told the British

newspaper, adding that Sudbury remains "a major environmental and health problem.

The environmental cost of producing that car Battery is pretty high."

A "Dust to Dust" study by CNW Marketing Research of Bandon, Ore., shows the overall

eco-costs of automotive hybrids may be even higher.

Released last December, the study

Taken from Bibbs New Scientist link, above

[PaulT]

Exactomondo. The environmental cost of making a car must be quite large compared to the emissions of the car during its lifetime.

All the raw materials have to be grown, mined and processed and shipped to the factories of Toyota and their suppliers. Then there is the cost of running the factories. And once you have finished with the car it has to be recycled which also costs energy.

Then there are knock-on commercial effects. If I buy a Supra or other classic Toyota coupe because they don't make coupes any more, demand will be reduced and fewer cars will be made next year. Factories and mines will use less energy. I guess the increased CO2 from the exhaust could be a small price to pay.

Paul.

[PaulT]

Keep in mind petrol is going up 2p in September and another 1p in April, VAT will be going back to 17.5% plus an other increases if the price of oil goes up :( The sensible person would be thinking of a car with £35 a year road tax or lower and something with over 50mpg just so they aren’t priced off the road.

Suppose an Aygo costs £7000 and a mid-nineties Supra costs £3000. If you get about 25 miles to the gallon in the Supra, you can do over 20000 miles before you have spent as much as the Aygo, which has done no miles. After that you spend about twice as much on petrol as you do in the Aygo.

If you do 10000 miles per year, after two years you still will be a grand better off in the Supra (the cost of fuelling an Aygo for 20000 miles). You can buy quite a lot of maintenance for £1000.

Paul.

[Karma Supra]

Do you honestly care about the environmentel implications of your choice of car???

Assuming new cars are built to order, buying a new car puts a new one on the road, Buying an existing car just means someone else isn't driving it.

Older cars seem much better built and finished to a higher standard too.

Also if anyone actually cares about CO2 emissions, you can halve your car's CO2 output, just remove the cat ;)

[Red diesel]

Old car everytime - i will concede they are not as safe - but we are not actually discussing the safety aspect here are we.

The Prius to my mind at least is the most overated machine to ever be produced - rather laughably other cars are able to come as clean or very near as clean as it with conventional diesel engines - and drive better ie (cough) the BMW MINI diesels and the new Fiesta diesels and so on.

Is there any reason that modern cars have to be so dull and boring - hilariously im saying this with a 10 year old 170 000 mile Corolla diesel sat outside in the yard - not saying much for the modern car is it.

Lets see now does sir go for a lovely LS 400 Lexus with leather and lots of toys plus lovely V8 engine - at 2 or 3 grand or a normal 1.4 diesel or whatever - and in the UK you guys don't even have to pay 1600 euros road tax either (unlike those of us from the Republic of Ireland) - and even at 1600 euros road tax id still find it hard to justify having a 2009 Auris - over 20 grand to you sir for a new one instead of an LS 400 - in fact id have the Lexus - the 16 odd grand saved on initial purchase would go a long way towards covering the extra running costs. Okay on pure finiancial considerations (we are talking about a 4 litre V8 here) - it wouldn't stack up so well againsed an Aygo but you run a 4 litre V8 because you want to not because of finiancial considerations. To me it wins out on the evironmental front too - the lexus has already being built years ago - your keeping it (the Ls 400) on the road instead of scrapping it - no brainer.

Red diesel

[duncerduncs]

Some of you are so last century!

If you have 5 minutes, try watching this...

Please wait a few seconds for Video to load!

As for diesel being cleaner...

CLICKY

[PaulT]

Interesting video. It's difficult to see many downsides after that B)

Paul.

[hertsnminds]

OK some maths

Apparently there are 600,000,000 motor vehicles in the World today source http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/MarinaStasenko.shtml

And a World population of 6,778,611,759 source http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html

That is 11 people per vehicle.

If the average annual milage is 10,000 miles and every car on the planet ran at 35mpg that would be 171,428,571,429 gallons of fuel

If every car ran at 70mpg the fuel used in a year would be 85,714,285,714, obviously half the amount of fuel.

If you replace every car at 3 years old you never have to replace consumable items such as the tyres, Battery, maybe brakes. Is is better to recycle 600,000,000 cars every 3 years or reduce production and keep those cars already on the roads running.

If you work on the premise that every car less than 3 years old is more fuel efficient (and usually safer) than it's predecessor then you are reducing the use of fossil fuels when driving (and reducing the risk of injury). However, you maybe increasing their use to actually manufacture the cars, unless you can recycle a high percentage of the scrapped vehicles.

You do of course have the issue that anything older than 3 years suddenly becomes a classic car

[PaulT]

If you work on the premise that every car less than 3 years old is more fuel efficient (and usually safer) than it's predecessor then you are reducing the use of fossil fuels when driving (and reducing the risk of injury). However, you maybe increasing their use to actually manufacture the cars, unless you can recycle a high percentage of the scrapped vehicles.

Unfortunately you can not recover the energy used in manufacture by recycling, only the materials. And it takes more fossil fuel energy to power the recycling process.

Paul.

[Charlies Angel]

If you replace every car at 3 years old you never have to replace consumable items such as the tyres, battery, maybe brakes.

I wish my tyres and brakes lasted three years.....

I refuse to be priced out of an enjoyable car into an environmentalistly friendly econo box, becuse "climate change" is the latest buzz word in the tax inventors handbook.

If the future for interesting cars really is as bleak as some people here think, I say best get some smiles per mile in before it is totally impossible!

To some people a composed car with a bit of poke behind it is an enjoyment thing, not a image thing. If I was at all concerned about image, I'd not have bought what I did!

Edit: The Mrs left herself loggin on again lol

[Leeky]

Aygo used to cost me about £100 a month in petrol £500 a year in insurance and £30 in road tax.

I sold that....now...

Supra uses £200 a month in petrol £500 a year in insurance and £190 in road tax..... plus im saving money not having a 2nd car..

Worth it....

Ohhh yes, without a doubt its worth every penny not to drive an eco box to work every damn day...

Economy is great but it isnt everything. I realised i'd rather pay more and use my weekend car all the time rather than have an eco box that i hated driving mon-fri.

Enviromentally i dont think what i drive makes jack all difference with china are churning out hundreds of tons of pollution every day..

[Red diesel]

Charlies Angel - i hate to say it but the future for nice cars that provide enjoyable ownership and driving pleasure is not particularly rosey. I think the way forward is for enthusiasts like yourself to try and preserve the cars you have now as best you can - with the stupid scrappage scheme a lot of the real nice older cars/and or older high performance cars are going to be on a trip to the scrappie before their time. Im not happy about this new idea thats been suggested about restricting it to post 1984 cars - i think it should be just abandoned althogether.

Did any of you see that classic car magazine that comes out every week in a newspaper type format - (cant think of the name right now) - and the story they have this week about the Minors that are going to be scrapped :ffs: - and the 1961 Mini - although it seems the Mini might be saved as its value is close to the discount coming off the car it was part exed againsed. The thing that bothers me as a car enthusiast is that it seems that having a car simply for enjoyment and pleasure is now frowned upon by those in high office - as is having a real nice older car thats kept well - and kept on the road simply because the owner really likes that car. On a positive note - im pleased to see in that magazine i mentioned above - that theres still cars being offered in their classifieds for less then 2 grand with tax and test - for example there was a Morris Ital for 350 quid this week and it still had mot left (can't remember how long - but i think its October its due a test - according to the ad) and there were a good few more cars like that in it too.

Leeky - i completely agree with your line of thinking regarding the Supra

Red diesel

[Sico2]

beginning from of course, if human-produced CO2 has any influence on the planet in the first place.

answer c. whatever suits your pocket :)