Looking under the hood

I started digging into the real climate-friendliness of different vehicles. An interesting resource is the Australian govt's Green Vehicle Guide. I wanted to compare my present vehicle, more or less, with one of the greener options (a turbodiesel Renault Kangoo). I know it's not the vehicle at the top of everyone's wish list, but eventually I'll either get to justify the choice, or change my mind. Unfortunately they don't have the turbodiesel in the Australian database. Instead I compared it with the Toyota Prius, which seems to be everybody's favourite hybrid at the moment. the Pajero scores 5/10 for greenhouse gases and 4/10 for air pollution; the Prius gets 8.5 for both categories (10 is best).

These numbers don't mean an awful lot by themselves, you have to dig into the site to get some real data. But it's a good tool; I'll use it again if I can find the cars I'm interested in, in the database.

A second fascinating report which I have linked from my growing resources page is an article on the true cost of low carbon transport, in the UK Inst. of Electrical Technologist's magazine "The Engineer". This cites a Canadian report comparing petrol, hybrid, electric and fuel cell cars in three scenarios. Not surprisingly, in a world with electric power generation only by nuclear or renewable methods, electric cars win dramatically. Even with only 50% of electrical generation by low-emission methods, the electric cars are still cleaner than any other method.

There's an American perspective in an article from a car sales site, on "Top 10 Ways to Equip your Car for a Greener Planet" . Interestingly, it doesn't mention diesel at all, except for a brief mention on biodiesel in amongst other "alternative fuels" (after LPG, before ethanol). Not sure what to read into that...