I own two 2004 Fords, an F350 diesel pickup and an Explorer. I keep both running well, and I am real good about keeping the emissions clean on the pickup. Neither gets run that hard yearly as I have a company vehicle that does about 90% of my yearly miles.
So on the basis of future higher ecological costs of operating a less eco friendly vehicle vrs buying a newer or new more efficient vehicle, where does the line get drawn?
Economically it’s wiser to keep the old vehicles because they’re paid for, low maintenance cost, lower insurance, etc - this is purely an ecological question.
Simply put when does the ecological damage of building a new vehicle vehicle cost less than running and maintaining an older, less efficient vehicle?
Not planning on a change anytime soon but I would like to better understand the impact of my choices.
As a first order WAG, consider the fuel mileage of your current vehicles versus whatever you’d replace them with. If the old vehicle gets e.g. 10mpg & a new equivalent vehicle gets 20mpg, you’re producing double the pollution per mile before we even consider how much cleaner the new exhaust stream is.
Of course if your life has changed enough since 2004 that you’d replace the old F350 not with a new F350 but with a new Ford Focus, we’ve got another factor to consider that counts against the old F350.
As you rightly point out, some fraction of a vehicle’s lifetime eco-impact isn’t the tailpipe emissions or brakes and tires consumed through the vehicle’s lifetime of use. It’s the impact of building and delivering it, and then the environmental impact of disposing of it.
This cite
(free with a (possibly fake ;)) email address)
Suggests that 80-90% of the eco impact is indeed the tailpipe emissions and tires. Not production & disposal. Obviously any such determination depends on how long a car is driven before disposal. One driven 500K miles has a larger lifetime tailpipe impact than one driven just 10K then crashed.
Only you can know how many actual miles your vehicles have accumulated and how many more you expect to put onto them at what rate. To the degree your vehicles are almost unused, they contribute next to nothing via the tailpipe and also nothing more until their disposal. Environmentally, they’re more or less coasting impact-free into the future.
Story time:
Years ago I lived in a big city, took public transport to work, and walked most everywhere else. My car got used maybe 100 miles a month. Maybe. Gas was cheap and it was a guzzler. Then suddenly gas went from ~$1/gallon to ~$5. Lots of suburbanites with long commutes had a crisis. Whether I drove a car that got 5 miles or 50 miles to a gallon, my driving was so small that my pitiful fuel economy did not add up to a material amount of expense.
Expense is a very loose proxy for environmental impact, but it’s not utterly unrelated. Since my expense delta was small, we can conclude my impact must have been low.
Extreme back of the envelope: Making a ton of steel produces about 1.8 tons of CO2 and burning a gallon of gas creates about 9kg.
If we assume that a car is just pure steel and requires no other emissions to create, then creation of a 1 ton vehicle is equivalent to burning 1000 gallons of gas.
If you assume a vehicle has about a 10 year life, then you should do so when the new vehicle will burn 100 gallons of gas a year less than the current one (per ton).
Consider that buying a new efficient vehicle doesn’t mean the old one gets crushed. It will probably be purchased by someone else with an even worse car (or no car). So, it’s still getting used, just not be the OP.
Clean emissions is a local pollution issue, gas mileage a global warming issue.
Trying to factor in the effects of your sale on the market in general becomes complicated fast.
If you barely drive these cars and don’t want to consider the actually environmentally friendly choice of not owning multiple cars, it’s plausible that keeping them is better. But the more you drive them the less plausible it becomes.
The car re-selling chain could be used to justify purchase of a new car. Selling your current car means that the hand-me-down chain of cars gets bumped one slot. The availability of your car in the market ultimately means that a worthless bomb of a car somewhere finally gets retired and crushed (and yielding raw steel and aluminium for news cars to be crafted from.)
So you could argue that the global environmental value of your purchase is the delta between your new purchase and the unknown wreck that is finally taken off the road.
My own view is that it doesn’t matter whether the old vehicle is crushed when the OP is done with it or after subsequent owner(s) drive it awhile longer.
Under the OP’s hypothetical where he’s going to buy a brand-new vehicle, that new vehicle will be created as a result of the OP selling his old one and buying that new one. That new vehicle will itself eventually be crushed. If instead the OP never buys a new vehicle, those two eco-events will never happen.
Just as your own birth ensured you’d have a death, the “birth” of a new vehicle is the same. Its eventual disposal is built-in. The timing may differ by years or decades depending on how long the vehicle is driven and by how many owners. But it’s still one birth and one death per vehicle.
Bottom line: Any reselling affects the timing of the eco-impacts, but not their severity.
@Francis_Vaughan makes an interesting point that IMO is 100% applicable to the tailpipe emissions (and other consumables) part of the equation. But not, IMO as to the birth/death eco-impact.
An interesting aside to that thinking is that the OP, to a rough approximation, doesn’t drive these vehicles; he merely stores them.
Thereby depriving Francis’s chain of ownership of feedstock. As long as the OP has a (nearly) unused vehicle car sitting in his front yard, some other driver who’d happily buy & own it is forced to buy something else. Which forces a new vehicle to be created somewhere upstream along that substitute hand-me-down chain the OP refuses to enter into.
To see this more clearly, consider if somebody (or some government) decided to buy up every car older than, say, 2 years. A vast supply of used cars would leave the market and a vast supply of new ones would have to be created to keep all those drivers driving. The OP’s decision to store (or nearly store) a small fleet is the same effect, just writ much smaller.
You could try the following. You can find the vehicle you have and click on it, and then you could find a vehicle you might be interested in buying and click on that and then compare.
How can I find and compare CO2 emission rates for specific vehicle models?
Visit Fueleconomy.gov and click on “Find a Car.” From the vehicle search results page, click on the “Energy and Environment” tab. A vehicle’s greenhouse gas emissions rate (g/mile) and GHG rating can be found there.
When shopping at a dealership, check out tailpipe CO2 emission rates on vehicle Fuel Economy and Environment Labels. The labels also feature a 1-to 10 Fuel Economy and Greenhouse Gas Rating to enable easy comparison shopping.
If you buy an electric vehicle, then your total carbon output falls fairly precipitously. Even more if some of your electricity is generated in a more ecologically friendly manner.
Only if it’s your usual drive and you have a commute or at least semi daily driving. Otherwise the higher production emissions of creating large batteries zero out your increased mileage. Electricity production and greening of mining have a ways to go before this becomes untrue.
It just changes how long it takes for the EV to be net positive. If the break even point is 30,000 miles then whether that is reached in two years or five years, it is still reached. The break even point is low enough that most EVs will far exceed them.
I’m going to call the question on that. Any regular automobile would have the equivalent weight in metal in the engine casting, plus machining energy. (At about 2 tons, a Model 3 is only slightly heavier than a BMW 3-series) And that doesn’t take into account disposing of engine oil, which may not be a climate issue but certainly impacts the environment. (Plus the amount of machining energy needed to cut the dozens of gears involved in a transmission, which EV’s don’t have)
Are we discussing overall pollution or just carbon footprint?
Then we can get into the carbon footprint associated with extracting and refining gasoline before the end product goes out your tailpipe. And the environmental toll of oil drilling and spills during transportation…
(And we haven’t even gotten into the methane footprint of leather seats vs. fake leather…)
I’m of course relying on calculations made by others, but the life-cycle analyses I’ve come across, some at least which include the full CO2 cost of extracting, refining, transporting and burning fossil fuels, do show you having to drive thousands of miles before break even.
If you only drive to the store or elsewhere in your neighborhood twice a week even 30,000 miles (which might be optimistic except for small cars) could take decades. Note that I wrote “Only if it’s your usual drive and you have a commute or at least semi daily driving”. My median weekly driving is around 20 miles, which means that, unless I did a few long road trips a year, which I do, break even for 30000 miles would take 30 years.
At that point the longevity of the whole car as a system starts getting questionable, though the lifespan of batteries have turned out to be longer than initial guarantees from EV manufacturers.
Look, I’m not saying the calculation won’t be positive for a lot of people, but my motivation in bringing up this point is that the OP is someone with not just one, but two rarely used cars. So if, for instance, you are an affluent upper-middle class American who has a family car, a sporty car and a truck you need because once a week in summer you need to buy big stuff from Lowes, replacing the truck with an electric one is unlikely to ever break even.
At the very least, since most non-renewable electricity comes from power plants using natural gas at peak efficiency, the EV uses less carbon. Natural gas is 4 hydrogen molecules per carbon. Gasoline, let’s say octane, is 8 carbons and 18 hydrogens - so more power in electricity from burning hydrogen compared to carbon. (Yes, coal is all carbon, so there’s that consideration if your power comes from coal). If you live where hydro power is common, like a lot of Canada, add that to the mix.
The other point to make is that when the EV reaches end of life, all that material - lithium, cobalt, nickel, etc. - is still in the battery unless your vehicle has had a very interesting end-of-life, unlike a regular car where all the carbon is long gone in the atmosphere. Naysayers will claim it’s not being recycled, but the point is that the volume of EV’s sold more than 5 years ago was miniscule, and most batteries are projected to last 10 years or more, so there is not a lot of feed for recyclers - yet. (Mine’s 4 years old, 50,000km and I see no appreciable deterioration.) Tesla was only just ramping up Model 3 production in late 2017 and early 2018.
But to get back to the OP’s question - a well-maintained engine will last a while and not put out appreciably more pollution. The question is, do you need as big a vehicle(s)? Both of them? Do you do a lot of stop-and-go traffic jam driving?
The other question that’s hard to answer is - how bad is the diesel? I know VW (and Mercedes? BMW?) were cheating on emissions tests and their vehicles put out really bad amount of NOx. OTOH, if like some of my acquaintances, the second vehicle is a truck but only used for big loads or camping trailer and mostly sits, then economy as well as carbon footprint suggests it’s just fine. If every big load involves additional mileage of driving to a friend’s place, picking up a truck, then driving it back when you are done - probably simpler to keep what you have. If you drive a long distance with the typical one-person-commute, get a small vehicle instead.
