Instead of railing against the car, read the piece below and push for papier maché car bodies.
These would be lighter (use less fuel/energy), collapsible (less damage to pedestrians) and easily replaced /redesigned/coloured (all aspects are attractive in terms of a cottage industry and economic growth).
The only drawback is that car electrics rely on the metal body, as a return Earth, but this can be, easily, overcome by use of connected Earth points moulded into the body parts.
I’m not sure how reliable UNESCO data is :
http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/file_download.php/a01355752c9e869a63cc5651084cfa30Cars+and+energy.pdf However, if we take the value for the energy needed to make a car as a starting point, we can reasonably discuss dependent issues. So we accept that it takes 20 GJ of energy to make a car.
From Consumer Reports (www.consumerreports.org/) we get that the average life expectancy of a new vehicle these days is around 8 years or 150,000 miles.
From http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c3/page_29.shtml, we can accept the value of 40kw-Hr/day as a reasonable figure for the daily energy consumption of a car. Hence we get 40 x 3600 x 365 = 52,560,000 joules per year.
So for 8 years that’s 420,480,000 Joules, or roughly 0.4 GJ.
I’m not sure how ell these figures stack up but the conclusion, using them, is that a car uses only 2% of the energy needed to make it.
We have a car industry blithely mass producing cars and a Government hell bent on scrapping cars, to the benefit of the motor industry, at as high a turnover rate as possible.
It would seem logical to try to achieve energy savings through consideration of reducing the planned obsolescence of cars.
At present most MOT failures are on rust, whilst most of the energy input is in making steel car bodies. Even electrical failures usually arise from rusting of the earth connections on the body work. This suggests moving away from a steel structure.
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This entry was posted on April 16, 2012 at 9:09 am and is filed under comments, politics, things I'd like to see. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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@TheGreenParty Making car bodies produces more CO2 than a lifetime’s driving. Use Papier maché
Instead of railing against the car, read the piece below and push for papier maché car bodies.
These would be lighter (use less fuel/energy), collapsible (less damage to pedestrians) and easily replaced /redesigned/coloured (all aspects are attractive in terms of a cottage industry and economic growth).
The only drawback is that car electrics rely on the metal body, as a return Earth, but this can be, easily, overcome by use of connected Earth points moulded into the body parts.
I’m not sure how reliable UNESCO data is :
http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/file_download.php/a01355752c9e869a63cc5651084cfa30Cars+and+energy.pdf However, if we take the value for the energy needed to make a car as a starting point, we can reasonably discuss dependent issues. So we accept that it takes 20 GJ of energy to make a car.
From Consumer Reports (www.consumerreports.org/) we get that the average life expectancy of a new vehicle these days is around 8 years or 150,000 miles.
From http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c3/page_29.shtml, we can accept the value of 40kw-Hr/day as a reasonable figure for the daily energy consumption of a car. Hence we get 40 x 3600 x 365 = 52,560,000 joules per year.
So for 8 years that’s 420,480,000 Joules, or roughly 0.4 GJ.
I’m not sure how ell these figures stack up but the conclusion, using them, is that a car uses only 2% of the energy needed to make it.
We have a car industry blithely mass producing cars and a Government hell bent on scrapping cars, to the benefit of the motor industry, at as high a turnover rate as possible.
It would seem logical to try to achieve energy savings through consideration of reducing the planned obsolescence of cars.
At present most MOT failures are on rust, whilst most of the energy input is in making steel car bodies. Even electrical failures usually arise from rusting of the earth connections on the body work. This suggests moving away from a steel structure.
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Tags: car bodies, Green Party, papier-maché
This entry was posted on April 16, 2012 at 9:09 am and is filed under comments, politics, things I'd like to see. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.