Do you have a car?

I’m normally not interested in cars; don’t have a clue about brands, motor size or other technical features. A car, as convenient as it sometimes is, just needs to take me from A to B in case I cannot walk or cycle. And, if I wanted to buy a car I would admittedly choose it according to color and ‘cute looks’. Not very sophisticated and - as I recently learned - TOTALLY wrong! Car does not equal car, and it looking harmless and sweet doesn’t make it less damaging for the environment (maybe a bit compared to full-fledged SUVs).

My boyfriend has a Citroen C4, 3 doors, normal looking and I was getting curious how this ‘not so big car’ would compare to the fuel consumption and emission level of other cars. How green is the car we currently have? Citroen is focusing quite heavily on environmental aspects when it comes to their advertising. “Airdream” is what they call their cars produced in ISO 14001 certified factories. “So far so good”, I think. But then I look at the really important information: an average of 6.7 liter per 100 km and emissions of 159 g CO2 per km. This is just 1 g under the current EU-average of 160 g/km for passenger cars but 67% over the EU target of 95 g/km for 2020. The fuel usage doesn’t look any better: 6.7 liters compared to the 3.5 – 4 liters most efficient cars achieve. Our C4 uses up to 90 % more fuel than the most fuel efficient cars and emits 77 % more CO2 than other existing cars (with 90g/km).

I got out my calculator to determine total emissions and the monetary impact, assuming that we drive around 20’000 km per year (with my boyfriend using the car every third month for commuting via car-sharing). Changing to an ‘ideal’ car would reduce our fuel consumption by 540 liters or around 680 € and reduce CO2 emissions by 1380 kg annually. And while the monetary amount doesn’t’ seem to be that much for a year; the carbon emissions are, in my view. Doing the calculation with the approximately 4 million cars in Sweden, and assuming that our values are somewhere close to average, the result gets impressive: 21.6 billion liters of fuel and 5.52 tons of CO2 emissions could be saved in the long run if everybody switched to an environmentally friendly car.

Trying to comfort myself by thinking that we are at least not throwing away a functional good helps only little: according to information I found on the internet (and maybe you know more about this than I do…) I found out that it takes between 3000 – 5000 kg of CO2 (or 400’000 liters of virtual water) to produce a car. Not that much compared to the 1380 kg I can save annually, don’t you think? There are however possibilities to minimize the bad conscious using a car: first of all naturally to use it less. Other energy-savers are not to use air conditioning (up to 10 % reduction of fuel consumption), properly inflate the tires (reduction of up to 3% fuel usage) or remove roof racks and unnecessary weight leading to another 5% in fuel consumption.

Check out your car under
www.whatgreencar.com
www.carbonfootprint.com