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Did you know: It's been calculated that the production of 1 new motor vehicle produces roughly the same greenhouse gases as an average older car in reasonable tune produces in 10 years of daily use.

The design life of a new vehicle is ( depending on who you listen to ) somewhere between 4 & 10 years.

If this is true then we can assume that a 10 year old car is " carbon neutral ", any vehicle older than 10 is therefore " carbon negative ".

Think then how enviromentally responsible it is for us to keep our 40+ year old English/Euro Fords in regular use.

peteleo wrote:Did you know: It's been calculated that the production of 1 new motor vehicle produces roughly the same greenhouse gases as an average older car in reasonable tune produces in 10 years of daily use.

This is actually a very good point which tends to be overlooked, even ignored and minimised. The average car produces more polution as it travels down the production line than it will throughout its natural life.

peteleo wrote:The design life of a new vehicle is ( depending on who you listen to ) somewhere between 4 & 10 years.

These days, four years is more likely: the use of computer software has considerably accelerated both the stress analysis and design processes. Many cars are built on the ame 'platform' - the underbody structure - which is often used over and over again for successive models, sometimes by more than one manufacturer. This obviously speeds up the design process and allows the use of existing (expensive) tooling. It's when the platform is replaced that both time and expense increase.

peteleo wrote:If this is true then we can assume that a 10 year old car is " carbon neutral ", any vehicle older than 10 is therefore " carbon negative ".

Yes.

peteleo wrote:Think then how enviromentally responsible it is for us to keep our 40+ year old English/Euro Fords in regular use.

However true, you'll never get away with this argument! The main reason for the scrapage schemes, both in the USA and here in the UK, is to promote car production to aid the economy; they have very doubtful environmental reasoning, although these do tend to be exaggerated by manufacturers and governments alike.

JAN,

I appreciate your feedback.

I obtained this info from an article about " Ways to save energy " from a Green Magazine. It went on to say that more people should be riding more bicycles to work and so on, as most of the articles are a bit Liberal and extreme.
So, we can at least relate to the comments made by the Magazine as a compliment to our hobby cars as enviromently friendly vehicles. Who would have known.

Cheers,
Peter

The best solution is...
A lot of public services (for example trains, tranways, eco buses)
And our classics only in weekend or for little trips.
I like this idea.

Ok I see some problems with new and old. I like to get a bit of mileage out of my cars but living in the north east area of the U.S. we have something called winter and as such they tend to pour cheap salt on the roads to try and keep folks from running into each other. Our auto industry seams to know this but they use cheap steel brake and fuel lines. These parts are for the most part, the first items installed on a vehicle during its manufacturing process. The 20 or 30 dollar difference between this and a rot resistant material just about totals a car before its death date should arrive. Older unibody cars had lots of problems below the skirt, new ones seem to hold up a bit better but now Ford powder coats the chassis on there F series pickups and I am sure some of the other separate frame vehicles and here we are with more planed obsolescence.
I guess they just want to sell cars so they total the vehicle design before they are even built.
I have put on 480,000 miles on a pair of F250 pickups since 1988, the 88 was around town until at least 2002. I have been doing brake lines and fuel lines on the 1997 and looking at all of the that environmentally friendly powder coating under the cab just has me wondering. Who is thinking up this crap, the auto companies, tree huggers or the morons in D.C. or is it a conspiracy?

Gary