Can you help us to get to the bottom of a crucial question? Is it cleaner, greener, and more environmentally friendly to replace your old car (let’s call ‘old’ 10 years+ for the sake of argument), with a new one?
It’s pertinent, because a ‘scrapping’ scheme has just been launched in Germany, and is being considered in the UK. Consumers are offered €2500 off the sticker price of a new car, provided they scrap their old, ‘dirty’ banger. It’s had a big effect in Germany. New car sales, which had fallen ‘off a cliff’ before Christmas, show a massive upswing since the scheme’s introduction.
Unsurprisingly, the world’s ailing auto industry is lobbying for the rollout of the scheme across other countries. Yet writer and campaigner George Monbiot asks serious questions of it today, arguing that from an environmental perspective "we might as well burn ten-pound notes in power stations”.
Monbiot’s chief issues are:
- It’s being dressed up by media and auto as ‘green’ and aiming to reduce CO2, when new cars aren’t actually that much more efficient than they were 10 years ago.
- That there’s no incentive to buy low CO2 cars specifically – consumers need merely buy any new car meeting the Euro4/5 emissions laws (which all do today).
- That (and you need to take his figures with a pinch of salt) essentially, the scheme equates every tonne of CO2 saved to be worth £2525, when existing schemes cost as little as £3.50 per tonne saved.
At this point it would be customary to highlight the flaws in Monbiot’s logic, but that’s very hard to do, because we haven’t yet found anyone in the auto industry who can provide a decent set of facts to back up the environmental argument for scrapping an old car and getting a new one. In Geneva last week, in conversations we’ve had with people in the industry and on this blog, we’ve asked the question but haven't yet found an answer.
Instead we can pick holes in the merit of Monbiot arguing “So £2000 from the government could help you trade in your old Citroen C1 for a new Porsche Cayenne.” First, he must mean a Citroen Saxo, as the C1 is too young, as a model, to qualify for scrapping. But it’s somewhat churlish given the lack of any true counter evidence that his wider argument is wrong.
Working from the way we live now
I do believe he’s missing a trick however. Monbiot’s articles are characterised by an attempt to be factually water-tight and reference-based. But they rarely illustrate new, better visions and often ignore some inconvenient truths about the way people live their lives. He’s still banging on about the frankly bizarre idea of coach-only motorway lanes… and ignores the fact that – in reality – a reasonable portion of people are likely to use a private, rather than shared, vehicle.
Two points then. First, if the auto industry wants governments to implement scrapping-type schemes, it needs to show people why this is a good idea from an environmental perspective. Someone needs to take a lead and attempt to answer the question. Of course it’s hard to answer conclusively – it differs on a case-by-case basis. But so what? Monbiot extrapolates some of his figures, so shouldn’t the car industry where data is hard to come by? Why not take a model of 15 years ago, and compare its CO2, NOx, recycled material content, etc. and compare with the equivalent vehicle today. Explain about pollutants beyond CO2 – which are important. Explain how much energy goes into building new cars – and how that’s being produced. Turn it into an example case study, and create a counter argument to Monbiot. We’ll even come and shoot the video if you want, and shove it on to youtube so consumers can make their own mind up. Simply doing nothing makes the industry look like it has something to hide – when most of those connected to it do believe it is changing – fast.
This leads to my second point – and where I take issue with Monbiot suggesting:
“It is hard to think of a less deserving cause. The motor companies have repeatedly failed to anticipate trends in demand. They have carried on producing thunderous gas guzzlers long after the market collapsed.”
While few could argue with the point that the auto industry’s issues are largely of it’s own making, Monbiot’s argument is lazy and out of date. The gas guzzler argument is questionable – but alludes to a critical point, which the current crisis provides an opportunity to do something about. This is that the trends of car buying consumers, and the design and development of vehicles exist in a relationship that is massively out of step. Five years ago, many consumers – regardless of what Monbiot thinks – did want gas guzzlers. And if you’d have been running an auto company, you’d have made them too – because they’re high profit vehicles. Small eco-boxes aren’t.
Yet when consumer demand suddenly fell away, it wasn’t that the industry carried on churning out thunderous gas guzzlers – it’s that its processes meant it couldn’t react quickly enough. Tens of large, sports and SUV programmes have been abandoned presently. But many of the small, hybrid and electric cars people apparently want are still on the drawing board, because although car companies know demand is there now, it wasn’t four years ago when today’s cars were first being conceived.
Likewise, factory production demands many factories churn out 200,000 models to make sense (see the great Bob Casey talking about this and related auto industry history in the video above). But they don’t make sense when there are no buyers for those vehicles. So the ‘crisis’ needs to be an opportunity – to create shorter development processes, link designers and engineers with consumers (currently, they rarely meet), and attempt to massively reduce lead times. Ultimately, the mass production model may be a busted flush – now is the moment for ideas on how it can be at worst improved, and at best replaced. To radically change the industry will require pain and job losses in the short term. Yet doing nothing – and propping up the industry with schemes such as the car scrappage programme, risks losing this opportunity, and simply postponing dealing with these ongoing issue for another day. Allowing the industry to carry on conducting ‘business as usual’ ultimately risks allowing it to inflict upon itself a slow and painful death.
Posted by Joseph Simpson on 10 March 2009.
Photograph: After 3 years on The Movement Design Bureau homepage, Mark retired the lead photo in this piece just this morning. And then we realised it would be perfect for this article. How about that for a retirement moment?