My car is over 13 years old, and I’ve had it for around eight years. It still has a dent in it from where a Muntjac Deer ran in front of me.
I’m afraid it’s a diesel, so it’s polluting in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and in terms of human health risks. That’s not good, but when I bought it I thought I was saving the planet!
This car has now achieved 217,000 miles. When I bought my first car (1980s) if it got anywhere near 100,000 miles it was doing very well, so I still have that yardstick in my mind whereas car longevity, even with Muntjacs on the road, has increased greatly.
Should I be patting myself on the back about the mileage it has done (and it still does high 40s mpg on average, and much more on long journeys) or beating myself up about it being a polluting diesel? Or both?
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There was an interesting article in the Guardian the other week by a journalist who compared with very detailed real world testing, the emissions of his 27 year old petrol Golf with his dad’s 12 year old Skoda diesel. Surprisingly the Skoda came out better than the Golf on NO2 and 6 times better than modern diesels! I’ve had my diesel Focus 12 years and vowed to keep it till 200k. I’m now at 199.2 and like you, in a quandary about what to replace it with. A lot of people are in the same boat and car sales may be stalling as a result. Look forward to seeing if anyone else has a good solution.
That’s a difficult one. If there were data about the lifetime impact of cars, model by model, covering sourcing the materials,, manufacturing, use and ultimate disposal, then you could make a decision. But there isn’t. In the end, you’ll have to make a utilitarian decision based on your own needs and your judgement about the risk of a breakdown or an expensive repair, the odds of which will increase inexorably. There are many modern small/medium cars with small petrol engines which return around 50mpg even on short runs. We have one and there’s no tax, either!
I still recall the angst for our family when we went from one car to two, back in the early 90s. Since the late 90s, we’ve had a petrol and a diesel vehicle so that at least one of us has been a bit more environmentally friendly than the other. For years, the diesel one was a 4×4 (I commuted to a village where the roads in and out were susceptible to flooding). Now, with a move inspired by my wife’s career, I find myself with a small and frugal Fiesta, though still a diesel. What will I do when I have to replace it? We live in Orkney, where an electric vehicle is a definite option: small geographical area; plenty of electricity being generated by renewables; and, a reasonable number (to my eye) of public charging points. However, hydrogen would appear to be the fuel of the future, so if I can hang on long enough, I may bypass the electric phase altogether. See http://www.emec.org.uk/press-release-surf-n-turf-hydrogen-fuel-cell-unveiled-in-orkney/
No point beating yourself up, either you can either afford a replacement motor or you can’t. If you can then replace it with something greener. There’s lots of petrol options that deliver decent MPG now, I have a 2ltr petrol Mazda which does well over 40 to the gallon but still has enough oomph to use on long journeys and best of all road tax is just £30 a year. I doubt it’ll get to 200000+ miles though.
If you like beating yourself up you also have to factor in the amount of pollutants involved in creating a new vehicle or scrapping an old one to further confuse the equation. Picking out a new car should be one of life’s joys, Good luck.
Have a read of this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/how_toxic_is_your_car_exhaust
Some new diesels (including Renault Megane and Nissan Qashqai reckoned to be emitting 12-18x legal NOx limit but can pass tests through defeat devices.
Also, even the “cleanest” new petrol or hybrid cars release lots of air pollution from their brakes and tyre wear. There is no “good” car.
Service your car meticulously, don’t drive it hard to avoid brake dust and avoid cities while minimising your driving as much as possible I’d say.
As with any purchase one faces many dilemmas.
The new vehicles are designed in such a way that they have to be maintained through a garage capable of sorting problematical electrics via diagnostics on gadgets. All this favours the manufacturers and their associates. Vehicles with complex electronics have also been shown to be subject of criminals able to design gadgets which allow theft and manufacturers have not been as quick as one might hope in combating this?
Why has the vehicle industry been slow in alternatives to oil based engines? Batteries have to be charged and will this be through solar etc.? Why is battery storage still lagging behind?
Apologies for simplistic questions, but for strategic thinking and consistency of direction from a Government would be wonderful, but maybe like white goods their term is a five year short lived throw away approach?
Apologies also that I’ve not answered the question, the observations offered are simply contributions to the discussion;)
If we knew previously what we know now about diesel fuel we wouldn’t have built so many cars to run on it, and governments wouldn’t have promoted diesel over petrol in the way they did for so many years. But we are where we are. I too drive a diesel, a Land Rover Freelander, which is 14 years old, has done 108,000 miles and has at least that much left in it. I take the view that so long as the vehicle carries on running efficiently and economically it’s probably greener to keep it on the road than it is to scrap it and buy a new car. All of which supposes that, 1) I could afford to buy a new car in the first place, and 2) I have enough life left to make it worthwhile, and neither of those apply. I’m a pensioner and pensions don’t usually stretch to new motors; I’m also 70, and I’m pretty sure my lovely Landy will see me off the planet!
From the environmental perspective, the ideal action would of course be to give up driving altogether and rely on more sustainable means of transport to get around – ‘shanks’s pony’ and the bicycle for short distances and train whenever it is necessary to travel further afield. We can all use our cars less in favour of these more environmentally friendly modes of travel but, realistically, for many of us doing without our cars altogether would be very difficult and, for example, make it difficult for us to do our jobs. It is therefore worth considering which type of car is least damaging to the environment.
One of the difficulties in answering this question is that there are various environmental impacts associated with motor vehicles and the type of car that performs best in relation to one problem is not necessarily the best with respect to another problem and we are therefore forced to prioritize one type of impact over another. When you first acquired your car, diesel cars were seen as more environmentally desirable than petrol cars on the grounds that they consumed less fuel and emitted less carbon to the atmosphere per kilometre driven. I believe that this is still true but diesels are now seen as less environmentally friendly as a result of their higher particulate and NOx emissions. These pollutants are important components of urban air pollution which is a cause of respiratory illness and premature deaths.
Although the pendulum has swung away from diesel engines I would argue that climate change remains a major environmental concern (perhaps THE major concern) and one whose many potential impacts include causing premature human deaths, although these may occur on the other side of the world rather than in your home town,and what we are doing by favouring lower NOx over lower greenhouse gas emissions is favouring the local over the global impact. I am not suggesting that that is an incorrect position to take (we can hardly expect the government to put the health of its own people as a lower priority than that of unknown peoples far away on the other side of the world) but it is important to recognize that that is what is happening.
I would therefore suggest that in choosing between petrol and diesel engines, the environmental preference probably comes down to the nature of the driving you expect to do. If you will be mainly driving short distances in town then a petrol engine is the better choice (there are also electric vehicles, of course, which contribute no air pollution at the point of use – other than particulates from tyre and brake wear) as you will be contributing less to urban air pollution. If on the other hand you will mainly be driving longer distances on motorways and trunk roads the local air pollution issue is less important and the balance swings back towards diesel.
Whichever kind of vehicle you use you can reduce your overall impact by:
* keeping your car properly maintained and its tyres correctly inflated;
*driving in a fuel efficient manner – avoiding hard acceleration and braking, adopting the correct gears, avoiding excessive speed;
* avoid unecessary journeys – car-sharing, combining several objectives into a single trip rather than doing them separately over multiple trips, ‘meeting’ people by phone or on-line rather than face to face and so on all help to keep cars off the road;
*use alternative transport where practicable; visiting London and most other large towns is much more agreeable and easier by train and more environmentally friendly than using the car.
In the interests of full disclosure I should add that I drive a diesel car.
well done for keeping it going!!!
how much of the earths resources go on making a new car? should we all keep our cars as long as possible? probably an unanswerable dilemna.
found this interesting, older diesels are cleaner than newer ones if i read this correctly http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/how_toxic_is_your_car_exhaust
I wouldn’t beat yourself up too much Mark given that UK has parked electrification schemes for our railways in lieu of diesel power that would eclipse the emissions from your old-faithful. Think about the carbon footprint resulting from manufacturing a new replacement?
On an un-related topic: caption in The Times yesterday of a heather moor being burnt: “A gamekeeper burns heather to stimulate new growth and attract wildlife”. I kid you not.
…and there was no place to comment. The picture and caption were entirely gratuitous.
Scrap it Mark, a diesel of that age must be among the worst type for particulate emissions. Buy yourself a brand new, state of the art, petrol hybrid and keep it for ever. When it comes to cars and any form of diesel transport, I think the immediate risks to human health are more relevant than climate issues.
It depends where your driving. Diesels pump out far more Pm10 and NOx (nitrogen oxides) than petrol but they are far more fuel efficient.
PM10 is very fine particulates that, whilst they may not be toxic, will persist in the lungs and cause respiratory problems.
NOx causes photochemical smogs (the brown clouds that you can see over cities) and also cause respiratory problems.
This issue is the high concentrations of these building up in cities where the is very little air movement. Added to this the high volumes of traffic and high volume of pedestrians and you have a recipe for problems.
On the other hand if you are travelling long distances on rural motorways/free flowing roads, then PM10 and NOx will not build up, the natural weather patterns and open terrain will allow these pollutants to disperse and not really cause any long term problems. In this case the fact that you will be produce and 2/3s of the CO2 that you would if you were in petrol car then diesel wins here.
The obvious solution would be to ban diesels in cities.
Keeping an older diesel with good mpg is probably still better if you are not driving much in cities. Assuming you replace it at some point with another that’s done a few miles it might be sensible to wait a while to get a modern plug-in petrol hybrid. That’s roughly our plan, moving back to car ownership having done without for 20 years.
Swapping a high-emission (greenhouse gas, particulates and NOx) car like an old diesel for a new one would obviously reduce your emissions, but don’t forget the huge embodied energy in a new car. A tonne of steel etc. requires prodigious amounts of fossil fuel to produce.
There is no emission-free alternative, even renewable-charged EVs have substantial particulate emissions from tyres and brakes (and more embodied energy than conventional).
The simplistic answer is to give up driving and walk, cycle or use public transport, but we all know car-competition has left the country seriously deficient in public transport and, in some places, hazardous to walk or cycle.
So, simply drive as little as possible and use the other modes as much as possible. And, of course, use your highly influential blog to campaign for sustainable transport. The other day you highlighted the disastrous drop in seabird numbers thanks to sand eel numbers dropping, in turn due to warming oceans. Those oceans are warming in no small part because all of us (me included) use cars and aeroplanes, though I’m now trying to boycott the latter entirely.
Consider an electric-assist bicycle? I’ve just got one to make my 17-mile each way commute doable on a daily basis and it’s great (except for the bitter cold this morning!). I get a nice smug feeling because I’m not driving each time I use it.
I really like these sustainable dilemmas blogs and reading all the advise.
Answer is I think neither!
Be proud of the length of time you owned your car but not it’s high mileage. Don’t beat yourself up for it being a diesel. We were mislead by the dishonesty of car manufacturers and you were trying to do the right thing.
I am in the scrap it camp. I think your annual mileage is high and so that is more reason to make a change. What ever option suits you best it will be better than keeping that on the road and doing a high mileage.
I read yesterday Oxford is going to bring in measures in two years to ban petrol and diesel cars. Times are changing!
Perhaps manufacturers should be encouraged to start offering “engine upgrades” where instead of buying a whole new car you can just buy a brand new engine to be fitted to your existing vehicle?
Anthony – interesting idea.
A little bit more thought on this topic.
I do believe we need to make a move away from petrol and diesel vheicles, but to what? I’ve thought about electric and I’ll use myself as an example.
I need to drive for work (it’s a downside of working as a dog walker) as such I currently have a 12 year old diesel van that has done 140000 miles. I could potentially replace it with the electric version which can do an advertised 106 miles per charge, and with an average daily mileage of 35 miles that should be plenty.
There is a problem though. What about longer journeys? Now I have a range of 106 Miles, but in reality and for safety that should be considered to be a 50 mile range. so every long journey needs to be planned so that a rapid (30 min) charging station is reached ideally every 50 miles. In ideal circumstances that means adding an extra 30 minutes to the journey for every 50 miles travelled, but really it would mean adding an extra hour every 50 miles travelled to wait for a charging point to become available for use. That’s not very practical when you think about it.
The alternative I guess is an electric van for local and work use and a small clean, efficient petrol/ hybrid car for those longer journeys. but then that is 2 vehicles to keep running not one, and I’m not sure if that’s an improvement on a single 12 year old diesel van.
IMO, what we need to do is to invest in hydrogen fuel cell technology. it’s clean at the point of use like electric, but has the range and refuelling speed of petrol & diesel, and I cannot see any reasons why it would be difficult to install hydrogen filling points in existing petrol stations, only thing holding back this technology appears to be the availability of filling stations.
Anthony – that’s very interesting.