Motor emissions could have fallen by over 30% without SUV trend, report says
Motor emissions could have fallen by over 30% without SUV trend, report says
BUT THA SAYFTEE OF MAH FERMLEEE
I heard a man once say, no shit, no kidding, that he bought his wife the biggest vehicle they could afford because she was a bad driver.
I knew a lady involved in a rollover accident in one of those old, flawed Ford Explorers back in the day. When she recovered, her solution to deal with her trauma and make herself feel safer on the road was...to buy an even bigger SUV with an even higher center of gravity.
The irony is that I have seen news articles about parents killing their own kids while taking their SUV out of the driveway. And yes, they had bought those because it was "safe" for the kids. The following is just one example you can find many more on the internet.
And unfortunately there's plenty of truth to this at least for those inside the vehicles. Driving my tiny hatchback in Texas can be really scary some days, the lifted trucks in particular have TERRIBLE visibility and simply can't see sedans. Their headlights are often higher than the roof of most sedans. It's so selfish and makes driving a worse experience for everyone else, propagating them too to get a massive light truck/SUV.
My parents recently sold their sedan for a SUV soley for the added safety and I honestly understand where they're coming from. If I didn't trust my reaction times as well as I do I'd want the same thing despite it making the roads less safe for others in the process.
Unpopular opinion: For more than 90% of the population a car with an Otto engine volume of less than 1.5l is enough. Anuthing above should be taxed heavily.
Cars should be taxed proportional to the fourth power of their kerb weight, in line with the road wear they cause.
Popular opinion with me
I've been a fan of little, simple vehicles for a while now. I have had a Geo Metro, Mitsubishi Mirage, and now I have a Suzuki Samurai. In all of these vehicles, I have had to deal with the same issue, when trying to get up to speed: The slowpokes in front of me. No matter how slow I go in my 65 hp little SUV, I end up waiting on someone in a much faster vehicle to get out of the way.
I drive a Prius and agree completely. It's fuel efficient and extremely utilitarian. I can fit ten foot lumber in it, or my two big stupid dogs and our luggage for trips. Even when my wife drives like a maniac, we still get around 45 mpg. We typically end up passing slow moving vehicles on freeway on ramps, despite it having a maximum acceleration of 0-60 mph in about 10 seconds.
a loophole in the cafe standards says the longer the wheelbase the less the fuel economy has to be and the manufacturers find it more cost effective to make bigger vehicles rather than develop efficient engines.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-wants-to-close-the-suv-loophole-that-supersized-cars/
This is 100% correct, and now they have put most people in an arms race as who buys the biggest one to feel "safer"
Also the rest of the world thinks we are weird and love giant cars now. We don't really have much of an option for normal sized cars
I wonder what the criteria for SUV is for these studies?
I’m probably an outlier but I switched from a compact sedan to a compact SUV that’s 10 inches shorter in length, 4 inches higher in height, and 1 inch wider than my old car. They are about the same in weight, within a couple hundred pounds, and the new car is about 80g/km lower in emissions.
I technically own an SUV but it’s not super different from a hatchback car.
I noticed the same trend here in the Netherlands so don't worry too much.
Pickup trucks are still a rare sight here though.
If we are going to leave the carve out for SUVs and Work Trucks, we need to at least:
A) repeal the tariffs on light trucks such as the Isuzu light truck.
B) require a business licence to purchase these "work vehicles", and require a CDL to drive them.
That will reverse this trend tout suite.
"How to make a car as big as possible without increasing the amount of space inside it."
We're so fucked.
Motor emissions could drop by 100% if we banned ICE vehicles already.
Yeah but short term that would be worse for the environment, interestingly enough:
"Almost 4 tonnes of CO2 are released during the production process of a single electric car and, in order to break even, the vehicle must be used for at least 8 years to offset the initial emissions by 0.5 tonnes of prevented emissions annually."
https://earth.org/environmental-impact-of-battery-production/
Do also note that estimated life cycle CO2 for BEVs are lower but not significantly so than ICE vehicles. The numbers do however improve significantly as we move to a more carbon neutral energy grid. Without construction improvements that reduce emissions the cap is at around 1/3 the total pollution for a BEV vs ICE. IF the electricity is produced and delivered without any CO2 costs.
The only real, long term, solution is to rethink transportation. Or some groundbreaking new battery tech.
I want to point out that the author of the article you are citing is not an environmental scientist or a climate change expert, but an economist with an interest in the field. The article is not a peer reviewed piece of work, it is more or less equivalent to a blog piece with citations. She is not citing peer reviewed research as far as I can tell, but instead a series of linked 'studies' (including drafts and organizational white papers) of questionable scientific value.
After reviewing, I would not be inclined to put much if any stock in her analysis.
Here is a peer reviewed article for nature, that finds BEVs are actually much , much lower in CO2 production even during pre use than ICE vehicles.
If Americans wouldn’t be so allergic to public transport, it’d be way easier to move away from the whole concept of personal vehicles (except bikes and scooters of course).
Yeah, the solution is not taking the car for every trip, and having car sharing available so you don't need to manufacture so many cars.
As others have pointed out, your linked article doesn't have any scientific weight and is hardly a source of truth. But even if it is correct, it is still better to move pollution outside of cities. There are no reasons to continue using ICE vehicles.
That's a good one! I approve!
ICE is here too stay. It's pure gasoline usage that will probably fall out of fashion. Toyota is experiencing with ammonia based engines that cut down on emissions almost entirely.
The only benefit of ICE over BEV is quick refueling, and that only matters if you're roadtripping.
The solution is fast-charging BEVs. Edmunds just released a roundup of EV charging times, and showed that with some Hyundais/Kias, you can get 100 miles of range juiced up in 7-8 minutes. Obviously, yes, that's still slower than dumping some dead dinos in your gashole and taking off, but it's still pretty quick.
With further technological refinements over time and infrastructure built to give you something to do during 15-20 minute charges, road trips will be perfectly feasible without ICE and will actually probably be more pleasant.
There is no large well of ammonia that we can use for fuel. Transforming green electricity into a liquid fuel, whether hydrogen, ammonia or something else invariably results in large efficiency losses compared to battery technology.
And entire world's economy would drop by 100%. World is not ready to transition into EVs, and most likely will never be. In my opinion what Toyota is doing is the right approach. Higher quality ICE engine which can directly burn hydrogen. They already have the engine, just need to push it hard enough so R&D pays off. Hydrogen is expensive and hard to make (in terms of efficiency), but it's infinitely more scalable than batteries, and cleaner too. But with higher popularity price will drop.
Despite being someone who is a huge SUV fan and who adores off road cars such as G class, Toyota Land Cruiser, Ineos grenadier, I genuinely hate to see them as "cars for shopping" in the city driven by women with blonde hair who has no idea what a differential is. SUVs belong to off road or long trips, not to cities where they have the highest fuel consumption.
PS: tbh, cars don't really belong to cities anyways
i wonder what else could have been made of the materials in trucknutz
Just more hot air
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A report by the Global Fuel Economy Initiative (GFEI) showed SUVs now represented a majority of the new car market (51%), and the average LDV weight had reached an all-time high of more than 1.5 tonnes.
Automotive companies market SUVs intensively as they provide the most profit: they are sold at premium prices but have a proportionally lower manufacturing cost.
The authors of the report called for governments to place restrictions on vehicle sizes to reverse the SUV trend.
The reduction in emissions from the motor industry has been driven by an uptake of electric vehicles (EVs), which reached 15% of market share in 2022.
The report also said markets with strong growth in this area, such as China and Europe, had the largest annual energy efficiency improvements of close to 6%.
Dan Sperling, the founding director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, said: “Reversing the trend toward bigger and heavier vehicles is key to achieving more sustainable mobility.
The original article contains 409 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Wankpanzery begets wankpanzery.
I didn't know this term before. I live in the land of wankpanzern, I'll be sure to use this one!
Not surprising since car manufacturers lobbied to get them classed as light trucks to dodge the stricter emissions and safety regulations that apply to general cars. Then marketed the hell out of them as there is more profit to be made due to them not needing to comply with as many regulations. And now they are everywhere and are way worst than cars in almost every way.
Funny how yet again the capitalist class chooses profits over any other metric leading to s shittier world overall. Almost like there is a pattern happening in every industry...
This guy does lots of videos relating to government and public roads.
This video sheds interesting light on the piece of the problem you've identified. It's also the reason for a massive increase in pedestrian deaths. Seems like cars got bigger to circumvent a law enacted in an attempted to cut auto emissions, but had several adverse consequences.
https://youtu.be/fEj-pyjA2oo?si=J5utF5B0y7zqpK1H
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/fEj-pyjA2oo?si=J5utF5B0y7zqpK1H
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Love ‘Road Guy Rob’. He has a lot of great simple videos on traffic design and oddities
There's a reason I don't watch tv news aside from the poor journalism, and it is this exact sensory assault format he replicates from them.