Cars, Japan, Peak Oil, Politics, Road
Want a new car?
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.
13 Mar 2009 Gavin comments off