Bigger heavier cars are safer - part 2 #cars #safety

The media loves to digest press releases and spit them back at us, with varying levels of additional balancing research added to counter the spin that the originator intended. Yesterday was the NYT, today it's Forbes mag: "So all things being equal, if you're concerned about safety, you want a bigger, heavier car." Well, that's the insurance organisation's spin on it, anyway.

And of course it's correct - the bigger the crush zone, the less force we experience in a prang. But it's not the only way to be "concerned about safety". For example we could simply drive smarter, take fewer risks and obey the road rules more religiously. Sure, accidents happen, but force being mass times acceleration means we could lop off some of that mass, which ironically could mean a smaller car, or ease off on acceleration. But the car industry thrives on acceleration - and emotion. The rational rarely gets a look in when it comes to cars, because "faster" and "more powerful" is portrayed as better. When we couple that with passive safety equipment and a host of gadgets to distract us we get fatter, heavier, bigger and more wasteful cars. And then one person will drive that 5-seater car to work. It's not rational.

Historically, we made some sort of decision in the 1970s to ditch some proportion of fuel economy in favour of cleaner air, and that indeed made some sense, at least if you don't consider driving less a valid option. We also dumped weight reduction for passive safety devices like airbags, which also made sense, at least if we don't consider helmets and harnesses acceptable alternatives. But life isn't black and white and our choices - or those made for us - have shaped the cars and the carbon pollution we face today. The net result of safety and clean air regulations has been heavier cars with poorer fuel consumption, with bigger, more powerful engines to make up for the extra flab. And more carbon released at every step, from manufacture to the actual driving. Were these the right choices, in the right proportions? Well who knows?

Just to illustrate what we have concocted with these legislated changes, I have a 1982 Alfa Romeo GTV coupe in the garage that weighs 1100kg and is propelled by a twin cam, carburetted 2litre four cylinder motor. That engine (in local Aussie spec) provides 175Nm of torque and 90kW of power (or 12.2 kg per W). For some odd reason we thought such specs not only sufficient but also quite sporty back in 1982. It was also quite expensive, relatively, which helped keep that sort of power out of inexperienced hands. Whereas today with cheap gas and cheaper cars we can get Subaru Impreza Turbo 4WD machines of 195kW/343Nm for much less money. And they weigh a mammoth 1425kg. Despite the weight gain (which has seen the WRX grow from a more reasonable 1200kg when released in the early '90s) we have here a car with a power to weight ratio of just 7.5kg per W. So it's waaaaay faster than a 1980's 4 cylinder Alfa, or a 6 cylinder one for that matter! We could call that progress.

The Alfa was about $15,000 (Aussie dollars) new, which is roughly equivalent to $43k today. The much more potent (but arguably safer and cleaner, if you want to justify these things) WRX is just $39,990 RRP. It could be considered safer, in the passive sense that the forces of any collision will be dispersed away from the humans on board; and it has improved active mechanical and electronic aids to assist in avoiding an accident in the first place. In theory, at least. Balanced against that is the extra weight, meaning more force to disperse, and extra power, meaning both increased acceleration (and thus force) and a greater potential for accessing the additional force. Now that sounds like a lot of fun, but is it safer?

The WRX example is played out in the sedan car market, too. Heavier, faster, more powerful - and bigger - cars - for less money, all wrapped in a purported "safety" blanket. To me it seems a contradiction of terms to have 'heavier, faster and more powerful' yet 'safer' cars, but you can make a case for anything if you want to sell cars, can't you?

And of course it's all about freedom of choice, isn't it?

EVs 'no better than current polluters' yet 'far better' - confused? #environment

The journos - if that's what they are - at Fairfax's Drive.com continue to pollute the Internet with their confusion. The headline reads Plug-in cars no better for the environment and they go on to explain that in Victoria, where 85 per cent of electricity comes from power stations burning more highly polluting brown coal, the figures show an electric vehicle will produce the equivalent of about 130 grams of carbon dioxide a kilometre - about the same as small-engined petrol hatchback. No problem, except that they then completely and utterly expose their own headline as misleading.

How do they do this? By turning the story on its head: But recharge the same electric car in Tasmania, where almost all the electricity is generated using more environmentally friendly hydroelectric power plants, and the equivalent carbon dioxide output falls to about 13 grams. This is far better than any car on our roads today - including petrol-electric hybrids - and lower even than the next wave of ultra-efficient vehicles slated for Australia.

Bizarre. Why write a headline like that - except to get people to read it I guess. And of course its all true - if utterly self-evident. Of course hydro-power is going to be cleaner than brown - or even black coal. Same with wind or solar powered grids. It's a no-brainer. Or is it?

They could have engaged their brains further and mentioned that hydro-power floods an entire valley, wiping out (in Tasmania's case) substantial forest ecosystems and replacing it with cold, 'dead' water. Apart from the environmental vandalism, there has to be a carbon cost to building a dam in the first place. Now it could be that hydro in the right place makes great sense, but we need to do a comparison with the carbon cost of building an equivalent scale of solar cell or wind farms, or building tidal generators. Such a comparison would include actual carbon emitted in construction and maintenance, the expected replacement life-cycle (ie when do we need to build another one?) and the extra cost of building the connection to the grid (which could be a very long wire indeed). And then do a comparo with current black and brown coal (or even nuclear power) power plants.

Until we do that analysis we are just making stuff up and generating misleading statements.

Electric cars - laudable but not 'carbon free' #environment #autos

Electric cars are certainly quieter, potentially more reliable and more durable than what we have now. And they make a lot of sense as a driving experience with their seamless instant-on torque delivery, but that doesn't mean that they are "perfect" or "green" or even better than anything else in every situation. They are an option, and a worthy one, if you really need to propel yourself and a tonne or so of metal and plastic around. I also know that the car-fan media is obsessed with "fuel" to the exclusion of all else. But really, this goes a bit too far:While Tesla’s electric cars grab headlines across the globe, a company in the NSW country town of Armidale is quietly developing its own contribution to carbon-free motoring.

Exactly how "carbon-free" is any electric car? Was it manufactured without burning fossil fuels? (Certainly not in this case - I can see plenty of coal-fired furnaces at work here.) Was it shipped around post-manufacture without emitting carbon? (Unlikely.) Were the raw materials mined or made without a single atom of carbon getting lost along the way? (Hmmm.)

What they (the media outlet) mean is that it's not a petrol car, it's electric. I think we gathered that anyway. Like the uncritical Top Gear fascination with hydrogen, it stumbles on a key point: it takes energy to make, store and move energy. Whilst making electric or hydrogen-powered cars may lead to a cleaner atmosphere in our cities, and whilst driving such cars may eventually be sustainable in some narrow sense, they still have to be made and distributed, and the energy to move it must come from somewhere as well. There's no free ride here folks.

Pro-car body says congestion tax 'a failure'... oh really?

In a nutshell Sydney's congestion tax isn't perfect - it doesn't target all vehicles that enter the CBD, and the effect - after admittedly a fairly short period of use - has been restricted. But it has had a small effect, and it has brought to local prominence the possibility of using variable charges to influence traffic congestion. Given the inelastic nature of the car-use demand curve, and the relatively modest impost involved, you could say it's actually been quite a success. But the opposition pollies, the lobbyists and the tabloid press - and even the broadsheets are tabloids nowadays - are howling about an(other) abysmal failure by the State government. But the complainants all have vested interests, don't they?

Now this is a world-wide issue, but I'm looking at Sydney as my example for the moment. The basic problem here is that we are at the cusp of a major change in attitude to transport planning and energy use, and it hurts. There are many lobby groups fighting these changes, trying to get the best deal they can for their special interest; and then there are the forces of change themselves that are making a nonsense of the lobbyists and their self-interest. History tells us that a compromise will be made, but that it will be a short-term one, followed by either radical change that will better our society long-term, or a succession of similarly poor compromises until we arrive incrementally at the same radical solution. Occasionally change doesn't happen fast or deep enough and the society perishes.

How's that for an overview? Could that actually happen? Well (mostly for reasons of land degradation, vulcanism and war) it's happened to big cities, nations and cultures in the past, so it can happen again. It sounds grim, but let's look at Sydney's planning, or perhaps non-planning as an example of a big city that has grown immensely over the last 200-odd years. For the last 70 years or so developed countries like Australia have chosen to vastly expand their road infrastructure, mostly at the expense of mass transport systems. Older, more established cities (especially in Europe) have mostly resisted, but all have had to face the challenge of the car. In many cases funds have been diverted from rail and tram building, mostly to road construction. Now this has largely been a popular move, at least up to now, and one based on 2 basic tenets: (1) that individualism is good and should be encouraged, even if that means encouraging the adoption of personal, individualised mechanised transport and (2) that fuel is cheap. Societies basically invested in the motor car by subsidising the road building and even the car-makers themselves. (And with each bail-out, import duty imposition, 'innovation funding' or tax concession to car manufacture or use we dig ourselves deeper.)

Well if we didn't wake up with the fuel shock of 1973 we started certainly doubting our basic premises in 2008. (Not that it's stopping us yet.)

Not every culture so worships individualism, indeed there's a sliding scale at work here. But Australia is a new-ish country, built along British lines but with an Irish urge to thumb the nose at authority. So we have the knack of falling into line like the British - or perhaps especially the English - whilst doing our utmost to pour scorn on our elected officials. So when Britain largely dumped trams and adopted buses, so did Australia - mostly. Melbourne resisted, at least a bit more than most Aussie cities. But Sydney had absorbed the English and Irish influences as well as a love for the USA and its individualistic 'freedoms'; thus the NSW capital not only adopted the bus but the car as well; and in so doing threw away its extensive - 2nd only to London in scope and size - tram infrastructure. Literally burning the carriages and burying the tracks under tar. All achieved by 1961, a brilliant result for the car and petroleum lobbyists in particular.

Now that was a radical change, but coming out of WW2, anything individualistic and "free" was looked at as "good". It felt good. It looked prosperous, fresh and new. Out with the old, in with the new!

But now, in 2009, let's face some facts. Sydney's inner-city road network was largely designed for horses, carts and pedestrians. For at least 150 years we didn't make wide boulevards, build garages or parking lots, indeed we didn't even pave main roads. But since then we have gone car-crazy, seemingly relegating the walking shoe, the bicycle and the horse to both the sporting pages and the lunatic fringe. And somehow convinced ourselves that fumes, noise and ferocity are acceptable prices to pay. It's OK to have cars and trucks travelling at 40, 50 or even 60 kilometres an hour just inches from pedestrians and cyclists. It's OK - even good- that we don't have to walk to the shops anymore. It's been so successful a deal - or brainwash - that we have closed down our corner stores and congregated our shops in huge malls that are largely out of walking range anyway. We have made the car a planning instrument in our daily lives.

And it's been a seductive sales pitch. Cars are comfortable and convenient and can reflect our moods. We are in control and can go where we please. Cars are a valued extension of ourselves, our prosperity and our personalities. But now we are tiring of the sheer sheetmetal involved - Aussie cars in particular are too big, too thirsty. We don't have big families like we once did and we fear that petrol will rise in price. Cars are becoming a dead weight around our necks. We fear also that we are doing something wrong to the planet by turning all of these fossil fuels loose in the atmosphere. Some of us fear calamity and are looking to change our habits.

Which brings me to the lobbyists that are fighting hard for "us". Groups such as the grandly-named National Roads and Motorists Association (of which I am a long-standing member), or NRMA for short. Although they claim to represent road users they do little or nothing to support bicyclists sharing those roads, or even cyclists having their own infrastructure. Although they claim to represent motorists they remain fixed on the old belief that car use should be subsidised by all (even the cyclists and pedestrians), to better grow the network of roads and encourage even more congestion. They say that they are against congestion but then again they don't want to pay for any decongestion: : PREMIER Nathan Rees' city congestion tax is a spectacular failure with a study revealing thousands of drivers now clogging alternative suburban routes to get to work to avoid the $4 toll.

Now logical analysis tells us that the CBD congestion tax will not be 'perfect' until we are charging it to all road-users who enter the CBD. That will be a technological and road-designing solution that I suspect will come to pass, but will cause even more political pain - something the NSW politicians in particular (on either side) do not want right now. However what we have now targets 2 congested roads - a bridge and a tunnel - and is effective. It has raised the cost of travelling along those arteries and put the minds of the motorists to work on solving the equation - is driving to work still worth it? In a year or so we will have the data and can assess its overall effectiveness at shifting congestion, either by time-shifting the road traffic or by moving people onto public mass transit. Tentatively it is doing both, yet the NRMA thinks not - although it states the opposite in its own analysis. Logically, if a small charge increase in peak hour drives some change, albeit a small one, a larger charge will drive more change. Whilst car use may be a fairly inelastic thing, a hefty enough charge will have an impact. Now that will drive more motorists to change their habits - and thus will reduce congestion. But the NRMA appears to want the opposite - no charge, and by logical extension, more congestion.

Go figure. Do we wind back road charges and build even more roads, or start asking a fair price from road users for public infrastructure?

What gets missed in carbon calculations - almost everything

It gets missed over and over again. The media is promoting some excellent ideas for a new carbon-reduced economy (here's another swag of great ideas) but it almost always involves simply replacing one existing form of engine or power-supply for another, with any pay-off well down the line. Yes, it's great to swap out petrol engines for electric, but the electricity still comes from somewhere.  Yes, reducing fuel use per kilometre is a great idea but what if it just means we drive further? Yes, solar cells are fabulous but how do they get onto your roof? Do they just materialise there, or are they trucked there? Do the workers drive to your site to fit them? How were the solar cells made - did it involve energy, and how much carbon was released? How long do we have to use the solar cells before we have neutralised the carbon released in their sales, marketing, manufacture, fitting and maintenance? We can ask the same about almost anything - including hybrid cars - and I can guarantee it won't be a pretty calculation.

I'm fairly certain (yes, this is an opinion only) that most of those who claim 'carbon-neutrality' haven't added it all up. In every case I've seen so far they look only at neutralising the variables, like fuel and power. When you add in everything else - the infrastructure, the elaborately manufactured goods, the services that supply, fit and maintain these goods - we can see an overwhelming problem. We are just fiddling with the edges and not attacking the central issue: our expectations are set sky-high and seemingly no-one is prepared to face that reality. We simply buy, use and discard too much stuff. And how do we propose to fix this? Well currently we propose to buy, use and discard even more - but slightly "better" or "greener" - stuff. Can someone explain how this helps?   

 

Porky GM Commodore admits fat problem

Yes, well, we all knew it. They have a weight problem at GM. They make fat cars. So rather than get creative, they are doing things they shoulda/coulda done 10 or 15 years ago!

Holden is looking at removing the spare tyre from the Commodore and instead fitting controversial run-flat tyres as part of a broader plan to improve fuel efficiency by more than 20 per cent and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Oh please. And the proposed use of aluminium will reduce carbon emissions, too, eh? Frankly we need to stop reporting this rubblish. The real story lies with smaller, lower-footprint cars, not sustaining the unsustainable beasts.