Diesels greener than battery cars, says Swiss gov report
1st September 2010
Sometimes the old ways are best.
Actually quite a lot of the new diesels are in the better-than-battery ballpark, according to UK government figures. The notional battery car considered by the EMPA analysts was a Volkswagen Golf with its normal drivetrain replaced by a battery one: but it seems that you would be doing slightly better for the environment to buy an ordinary new Golf with a 1.6 litre “BlueMotion” injected turbodiesel – which would be a lot cheaper. That would consume 3.8 l/100km, not 3.9.
So would a new Mini Cooper D hatchback or a new Ford Focus, actually. And if you could bear to go for something a little smaller – VW Polo rather than Golf – you’d be streets ahead on the environmental front, down as low as 3.4 l/100km with more than 15 per cent of the car’s in-service emissions clipped off compared to the 3.9 l/100km battery-car baseline. As the Swiss boffins tell us, it’s the in-service energy use and emissions which count most.
September 1st, 2010 at 11:11
An old friend works at a Ford plant. When the crust of management comes to pay an occasional visit, the Q&A session will cause at least one worker bee to ask why Ford has a great selling extremely high mileage diesel car in Europe but won’t sell it here. Management squirms and says their reseach indicates Americans won’t buy them because it’s hard to find places that sell diesel. The workers will invariably point out that every gas station in the county also sells diesel. This should indicate just how out of touch management is with reality.
I envision a time in the near future when inner-city kids ‘dis’ each other with, “Yo mama so stupid, she buy a Chevy Volt!”
September 2nd, 2010 at 03:13
One of the reasons is that most such cars won’t pass our environmental regulations without modifications that are so expensive as to make them uncompetitive, so it’s not always the company’s fault. Ed Wallace, on his weekly Saturday morning radio show WHEELS on KLIF, typically has one rant every show on that very subject. Don’t get him started on Volkswagen TDI models.