The Automotive Industry's Red Herring: Go Green! Recycle!

Ford introduced a $350,000,000.00 program to the Canadian government last night intended to boost sales of new automobiles in Canada. The premise: Offer consumers a $3500 credit for trade-in vehicles 11 years or older against the purchase of a new automobile.

Now as someone who knows a thing or two about engines and fuel efficiency, I always found the argument that new vehicles should be traded in for "greener" ones to be illogical, since I know that the average horsepower of most vehicles has gone up and the available engine displacements have gone up significantly as well.

Fuel for thought

1986 Honda Civic Fuel Economy: 26MPG City, 33MPG Highway
1998 Honda Civic Fuel Economy: 27MPG City, 34MPG Highway
2009 Honda Civic Fuel Economy: 26MPG City, 34MPG Highway

and if you buy the 2L version
2009 Honda Civic Fuel Economy: 21MPG City, 29MPG Highway

So the fuel efficiency of this particular vehicle hasn't budged at all in the last 23 years, never mind 11 years. So a well tuned 1986 Honda Civic driven well would presumably have the same fuel consumption as a 2009 Honda Civic! And it seems obvious that the production of any new vehicle would have significant carbon emissions and environmental effects resulting from it's production.

Just for the heck of it, lets look at a Ford F150 Truck:

1985 Ford F150 4.9L 2WD Fuel Economy: 14MPG City, 18MPG Highway
1998 Ford F150 4.6L 2WD Fuel Economy: 14MPG City, 19MPG Highway *note the smaller engine displ
2009 Ford F150 4.6L 2WD Fuel Economy: 14MPG City, 19MPG Highway

Additionally you may want to note that in the 80s and 90s Ford offered a full size pickup with a 6cylinder engine that offered 15 City, 19 Highway and they don't offer that engine today.

Trucks have barely budged either, if not at all since the base engine displacement has gone down over the last 20 years.

Now I'm not trying to suggest that people stop buying cars, but lets be honest about our reasons for buying one, other than the supposed "greener" benefits. There are many other considerations for buying a newer vehicle: safety, reliability, a shiny new coat of paint, etc.

However, the bottom line is that there are basic laws of physics at play when you use fuel to go from point a to point b. Even at a 100% fuel efficiency you still need to consume a certain amount of energy to move the weight of a vehicle and it's contents from point a to point b and to do it with any modicum of speed you need a lot of power input. People will claim that you can build a 100MPG vehicle and they're probably right, but what kind of WORK can it do?

The Volkswagon Lupo 3L has a 1.2 litre 3-cylinder diesel engine with turbocharger and direct injection that makes 60 Horsepower and has 78MPG! But the bottom line is that in North America, consumers demand more and more horsepower every year. Instead of raising the fuel efficiency of their Civic, Honda chose to increase the base horsepower of their 1.6L engine to meet the best selling Cavalier which was shipping with approximately 40 more base horsepower until a few years ago. How well would the Lupo do in a market like this? Probably very poorly which is why we don't see it on North American streets.

Fuel efficiency isn't always what it seems and horsepower to weight ratio is an important consideration for a lot of vehicle buyers (certainly not all of them, but a lot anyway). And buying a new vehicle simply because it's supposed to be "greener" might not be the informed decision you think it is, so if you're buying a new vehicle solely for green reasons, you might want to talk to your auto mechanic first to see what kind of fuel efficiency you can squeeze out of your current car by giving it a tune up and maintenance rather than buying a new one.

But if you want to help out the automotive sector and need a new car - now might be the time to buy one!

*all fuel efficiency estimates are based on figures from http://www.fueleconomy.gov which is "maintained jointly by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The site helps fulfill DOE and EPA’s responsibility under the Energy Policy Act (EPAct) of 1992 to provide accurate MPG information to consumers"