Let’s take a rather large vehicle, like a Chevy Suburban, and a smaller one, like a Mini.
When you add in the energy needed to mine and melt the steel, cast the aluminum, tie up hydrocarbons in the plastics, etc…how much is used in the production of a new car? Measure it in terms of whatever you want, BTUs, KWh, whatever, as long as it can be compared to the price of gasoline somehow.
My BIL sugested over the weekend that it is more environmentally responsible for him to keep and drive his Suburban occasionally than to trade it in on a brand new car. I’m not inclined to disagree with him, but I am having a hard time coming up with numbers to make an argument either way.
This would be difficult to determine. It is because of this difficulty that the concept of a free market has arisen.* The market determines what the price of a new car/SUV is, and ideally, this has some relation to the actual cost to produce the vehicle. The cost of the vehicle, of course, reflects all of the materials and labor and energy that go into producing the vehicle.
I would therefore compare the price of a replacement vehicle and that of its fuel to that of the Suburban’s fuel price, over a given time period. Off the top of my head, I suspect that your BIL is correct. The payback period for a replacement vehicle (especially if it is new) is likely to be significant.
This is why the government is trying to change the equation around with the “cash for clunkers” program. The cash is intended to offset the cost of the replacement vehicle.
*Note: just like it is difficult to determine how many chickens a car is worth, it is difficult to determine how much energy goes into producing a vehicle. Also, just counting the energy used in actually smelting the steel, etc. doesn’t take into account the energy necessary to feed and house the designers and factory workers. The free market takes all of this into account.
take 10 percent of the price of a new car. Thats XYZ dollars. Thats how much energy it took to make the car. convert that to gallons of gasoline.
Take the old car. Say it gets 25 mpg. Take the new one. Say it gets 35 mpg. Take that XYZ dollars/gallons and figure out how many miles the old car has to drive so that its used more gasoline than the new car plus the WAG of 10 percent value in gasoline. Thats your break even point. If he doesnt drive very far/often, that breakeven point could be years down the road.
Oddly, I don’ think this is the case. The cost of the individual components created for a Chrysler 300 are not significantly more expensive than those for a BMW 5 series, yet there is a substantial price differential. Same thing fo the diference between minivans and SUVs. There is a reason that car companies have rushed to fill the SUV market until recently, because the markup was substantial.
To take an example from another thread, text messages have an almost zero marginal cost when added to the established infrasstructure of wireless communications, yet their pricing structure on a per-unit basis dwarfs those of voice calls, which are much more expensive to handle.
To convert this to energy is a bit tricky, at least given the information in the report. The same report estimates that light duty vehicles in California were responsible for 2.96 million metric tons of carbon, so the 11% would translate to about 326,000 metric tons of carbon emissions. Converting this to CO2 would give
326,000 x 44/12 = 1.19 million metric tons of CO2
Now making a heroic assumption that most of this energy is in the form of electricity, and using the EIA’s estimate of 1.3 lb CO2 per kilowatt-hr, we get 2.02 billion kWhr for all the light-duty vehicles sold in California (for 2002). The EDF report says that there were 2,111,000 light duty vehicles sold in California that year, so that would work out to just over 950 kWhr per vehicle.
That seems pretty low to me, though. Converting to Btu and then to gallons of gasoline would give you 175 gallons per year per vehicle, or at 24 mpg, about 4,200 miles per year. That’s definitely low for California - probably more like 15-20 thousand miles per year, which (if everything changed linearly) would result in an energy of manufacturing about 3-4 times higher.
I’d have to read through the EDF report more carefully to see what their heroic assumptions were. I tried to calculate the CO2 per vehicle using CO2 per gallon of gasoline, and came out even worse than the energy calculation, so I may be missing something.
Anyway, my BOTE (back of the envelope) estimate would be on the order of 2,000 kWhr of electricity (probably +/- 1,000, and lower than the 3-4x to account for errors) per vehicle, which assumes that the EDF numbers are correct.
If you just can’t go on without knowing, the report cites book on the manufacturing number:
Keoleian, G., K. Kar, M.M. Manion, and J.W. Bulkley, Industrial Ecology of the Automobile: A Lifecycle Perspective,Warrendale, PA: Society of Automotive Engineers, 1997.
Granted, the market price of an item does not always track with the cost to produce it. Some items are marked up more than others.
Nevertheless, to consider a more dramatic contrast, it certainly takes more labor to produce a high-end Bentley Continental than it does to produce a Chrysler 300. (And of course it takes energy to support this labor force.) The extra labor costs are reflected in the price of a Bentley.
I don’t think that you can argue that there is no relation between the price of an item and the cost it takes to produce it.
I have no idea if what I am about to say is true, but I’m not so sure that this statement is correct.
According to there website:
I’m gonna guess that your paying for more than the cost of labour, I’m pretty sure Chrysler won’t let ya go to the factory and pick which color thread you want in your seats. I think the cost of one skilled craftsman would still be cheaper than four guys and a robot.
Once again I’m not sure this is true, it’s just my opinion.