Ippoippo

There were two articles recently in the Guardian, both talking about a German scheme being set up where you get £2000 cashback if you scrap your old car and buy a nice new one. It’s being marketed as being green as well as being good to help the car industry. The links are here and here.
To summarise, both authors came to the conclusion that, from a ‘green point of view’, it was a load of bollocks.

Now it turns out, by coincidence, I’d been considering buying a new car. Honda had announced the new Insight (a smaller, cheaper, more driver friendly version of the Toyota Prius). Turns out that Honda had also brought a new ’09 model of the Jazz out too, which looks a bit more smart and edgy compared to the older model.
Anyway, the petrol head that has been dormant for a little while started to shout!

So, what better way to shut it up than to start being a complete geek and create a spreadsheet full of numbers and graphs.
Again, all this seemed to be a bit of coincidence because at the same time, I was already doing a cut down version of this exercise as part of a report into my travel patterns past and present and what should I do in the future to be more eco-friendly. This report was for the Open University course I’m studying for.

So, I plugged in the numbers for Honda Insight, Honda Jazz, the Toyota Prius (current Mark 2 version, there is a Mark 3 on the way), Mazda 2 and the new 2009 spec Toyota Yaris. All this was against my current 2000 model Toyota Yaris.

Conclusion: The cold, hard facts pretty much agree with what the two Guardian articles said. There is absolutely no point in getting a new car.

From a cost point of view, the savings that would be made on petrol costs (assuming the worst cast scenario of me driving myself to work to my current employer 44 miles away, at 200p a litre… currently, I drive two days a week, with my car share colleagues driving the other three days) and car tax (lower tax bands, or the same as current) would still not have paid off the actual cost of buying the car in the first place even after 15 years!

From a CO2 point of view, at most it would I would be saving 1 tonne of CO2 a year (current verses Insight) to 0.4/0.6 tonnes of CO2 a year (current verses Jazz/new Yaris).
Now, the question is, what is the imbedded energy in the new car. The Insight is certainly higher, especially with regards to all that exotic nickel in the battery. If we go with the figure in the Guardian article of 5 tonnes of CO2, it wouldn’t be until 2014 before I starting ‘saving’ CO2.

Ahh well. At least I controlled the consumer in me, and saved my cash for something else. Ahh bugger, I flying to Japan to see the in-laws. That’s f**ked up the footprint reduction exercise.

Woooaaa. Here’s a rather strange change in mood from Jeremy Clarkson.

i think he’s just entered ‘phase 1 – panic’ at the realisation that there are Limits to Growth.

In fact, he pretty much continues along the same theme when he was meant to be reviewing the new Vauxhall Insignia.

These, as I see them, are the facts. Planet Earth thought it had £10. But it turns out we had only £2. Which means everyone must lose 80% of their wealth. And that’s going to be a problem if you were living on the breadline beforehand.

Right now, there are two paths you can go down. You can either adopt the Irish attitude to the impending catastrophe and party like it’s 1999. In which case you are better off ignoring the Vauxhall and buying a 24ft Donzi speedboat instead.

Or you can actually start to make some sensible preparations for the complete breakdown in society. In which case you don’t want a Vauxhall either. Better to spend the money on a pair of shotguns and an allotment.

Ahhh, nostalgia. 10 years ago now (well, 10 years this October), when I was a complete petrol head, just left university, and still loved to play games on my PC… Grand Prix Legends arrived!

None of this arcade-y type racing game, this was a proper hard-core simulator, and I would be playing for a good number of years after it came out (it was patched a fair bit with improved grpahics etc etc).

Of course, since then, I’ve been to Japan, gone ‘green’, got married (so less spare time too geek around)…

However the world of simulations moves on, and I saw this recently on YouTube.

How cool is that (well, maybe not the gloves )…
Hmm, what’s the Carbon footprint of doing that for real versus the electricity usage of running it on a computer.
Most of these games are on PC still, however we now have a iMac as well as the MacBookPro. The iMac is Yuko’s machine (and TV machine). But that machine also has a Windows partition on it so we can run some Japanese software that isn’t available on the Mac. Hmmm, Windows partition… Windows car games.

Well, this one was a bit of a shock!

Now, have they done this because they know Kimi is off to Ferrari in 2007, when Shumacher retires at the end of 2006?

I wonder how JPM fits into all this. Sure, if Kimi is off to Ferrari, then you’d think JPM would be safe… but then you’ve got Hamilton snapping at his heals.
I remember watching Hamilton as a 12 year old kid, when they used to show Karting on British TV on a Saturday lunchtime. The lad was a genius behind the wheel in those days. At that age, Schumacher was his hero, and like his hero was a master in the wet, and had a rather ruthless streak!

Talking of cars, I found this great Honda site (used to be a Integra Type-R owner). Some of the history stuff on it is pretty cool.

Warning: Broken Record alert.
Of course, it’s a shame all this motorsport and car stuff is going to be going down the plughole in the next 10 years with oil supplies getting tight.