@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.

personal transport

Public transport is not the answer to green issues. we need personal transport, especially in an aging population.

You can’t tell an oldie to walk or cycle into town and pay (reducing pension pots) for home delivery of shopping.

Re-design cars:

Cars cost more, in energy terms, than several years of burning fuel. So stop planned obsolescence.

Most cars fail the MOT   because of rust causing structural and electrical (return path) failure.

Make car frames from brass, or bronze, with engines, transmissions being bolted on (insulated to prevent electrolytic action). The chassis could be plastic or resin filled papier-maché.

Those besotted with fashion could get new chassis’s that were designer coloured/painted.

Standardised interfaces could allow petrol engines to be swapped for electric, or whatever new invention comes through,  but the basic car would last forever, be cheaper on parts, be lighter and more energy efficient.

(Did you know that a Porsche engine could be fitted in a VW Beetle, because the interface is the same?)

They would, also, cost less for insurance, as repairs would be cheaper. Brazing  and bolting, instead of arc-welding. plastic or foam filled chassis parts would act as  quickly replaced, or cheaply repaired, crumple zones.