Go Greener, Australia

I don’t normally get excited by prototype cars, and this one would be too big for me and Dave (SUV size), but I’m really intrigued after reading about it: Turn On, Plug In, Drop Out by Joseph Romm.

It’s a plug-in hybrid car. It has a fast-charge battery that can be charged from your home’s electricity, no petrol needed. The disadvantage of the fast charge time is that it discharges quickly too - 64km (40 miles) of driving will use it up. However, 64km is more than most people drive on an average day. If you do drive further than that, the normal hybrid battery kicks in, so you can just keep going with no problems, filling up with petrol if necessary.

Obviously, if your plug-in car relies on electricity, it’s not that much better for the environment than oil/petrol if your electricity comes from coal. But electricity can come from green sources, while oil can’t, so there’s definitely room for reductions in the greenhouse gas emissions created by cars.

What’s interesting to me is that this isn’t a radical new concept, it’s an incremental improvement on already-proven technology. I reckon frequent small improvements can be taken on quickly by the general population (that’s us), and will get us what we want a lot faster than waiting for a breakthrough in hydrogen vehicles, or a magic bullet solution to the emissions from petrol.

Unfortunately, AFS Trinity is not a car manufacturer - the XH-150 Extreme Hybrid SUV is a retrofit of an existing hybrid SUV, with the help of auto engineers Riccardo. This seems to be the latest in a long line of car ideas that have been prototyped, and very few of those prototypes ever make it to market where people can actually buy them. I’d love to see a car company take AFS Trinity’s idea on: it’s practical and a good halfway-point in the transition to fully electric vehicles.

Joseph Romm wrote an article about it at Salon: The Car of the Future is Here and you can see a video of his test-drive . AFS Trinity has their own videos too.

On the weekend we took the Prius out for it’s first long-distance drive. We travelled about 450km to the town where Dave’s parents live, taking about 5 hours (including a couple of stops).

We’d been told that a Prius wasn’t as efficient on country drives, but our experience showed it being only slightly less fuel efficient than it is on our regular city routes. It did very well on the long drive: on the way there we got an average of 4.8L/100km fuel use; on the way back it was more like 5.6L/100km. Dave found that cruising along in 90km per hour zones was more fuel efficient than driving in the 110km per hour zones.

Our return trip had us driving into a strong headwind, which is why there’s such a difference in the rates. Some Prius reviewers had mentioned that it gets blown around a bit in strong winds, and we found that to be true! Geraldton is pretty windy, and the Prius is a pretty light car, so we weren’t really surprised by that.

So, even though we bought a secondhand Prius to replace our old car, what were our other options?

Fuel-efficient petrol cars

The less petrol you use, the fewer greenhouse-gas emissions you create. Buying a fuel-efficient car is the easiest green choice for cars now, as the fuel-efficiency is marked on a sticker on all new cars sold in Australia, as is the amount of pollution it will create per 100km. However, it’s not the only way to make a greener choice when buying a car.

Diesel

Hybrid cars work at their best in city trafffic - but if you do a lot of country driving, diesel could be the way to go instead. Diesel is fuel-efficient, and it also creates fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than petrol does. However, it also creates more air-pollution than petrol or LPG, in the form of particulates and nitrogen oxides, and a diesel vehicle is usually more expensive to buy than an equivalent petrol car.

Bio-diesel

Bio-diesel is made by creating a chemical reaction between vegetable oil or animal fat and alcohol, so it’s from sources that are renewable as opposed to fossil-fuels like diesel, petrol and LPG. However, it still has to be blended with diesel and many car manufacturers will not guarantee the performance of their cars when biodiesel makes up more than 5% of the fuel mix.

LPG

LPG is an attractive option because it’s cheaper than petrol and creates fewer greenhouse-gas emissions. You can also get rebates from both state and federal government on the cost of converting an old car to run on LPG. It’s less polluting than diesel, although I couldn’t find any info on how it compares to petrol in this regard. The disadvantage is that it uses more fuel than petrol. It’s a good option for some people, and you can use the RAC website’s LPG calculator to see if it would suit you.

In the end…
…what it comes down to is that Australia has a pretty limited range of cars that cause less damage to the environment. Setting fuel-efficiency standards for all types of vehicles (plus some rebates or incentives for the cars that do better than those standards) would go a long way to reduce the damage we do to the environment by driving. I could get started on how public transport, biking and walking are also made more difficult than they have to be, but that’s a rant for another day

If you’re interested in the future of transport in Australia, check out the Alternative Fuels Australia blog. It’s well written and covers the different fuel options available around Australia, and how they’re used, with news and updates.

We got our used Prius yesterday, trading in our old car. We used it for all our usual Saturday errands, and it was great! I haven’t gotten used to the display showing when the car is using the battery, regenerating it, or using petrol, so I keep staring at it. But Dave has adjusted and finds it much the same as any other dashboard display now.

Click the photo to see the large version at my Flickr account.

Our old car was using about 10 litres of petrol per 100 kilometres. So far the Prius is using 5.5L per 100 km. According to the Toyota Australia website, it’s possible to get an efficiency of 4.4L/100km. I used the Prius fuel saver calculator to see how much we’re reducing our pollution and fuel costs.

So if the 5.5L/100km becomes standard for us, then we’re looking at CO2 emissions reduced by 1715 kilograms, and fuel savings of $912.

And the stereo is way better than the one we had in the old car

A few weeks ago I wrote about how we were trying to make the greenest possible choice when buying our new car, and then I went quiet on the topic. The plan was to try different types of green vehicles and report on them in the blog - but we’ve ended up with a different plan after all.

When we took a Prius for a test-drive, it was with the understanding that although it’s currently the greenest option available for cars, we probably wouldn’t be able to afford one, and so we’d have to try other things too. But then we found that there were several Priuses available secondhand for reasonable prices! So we’ve made arrangements to buy one, and are very happy with that decision.

If you remember the pros vs cons list I wrote about the Prius, the only con was the cost. Buying secondhand means we get all the benefits of a Prius, without the hefty price tag. Woo-hoo!

Photos of the Prius will be posted here when we get it, hopefully this weekend. A list of other car options we considered will come after that

Last weekend we took a Prius, a hybrid petrol-electric car, for a test-drive as part of our plan to buy a green car. Treehugger explains how hybrids work in it’s Green Basics article on hybrids. They’ve got both a petrol and an electric engine, can use either one (or both) depending on which one is more efficient for the type of driving you’re doing, and can switch off both if you’re coasting or just sitting at the lights. They also have really low greenhouse-gas emissions and pollution emissions compared to other cars.

Dave did the driving, and says the Prius handles much the same as any medium-sized car. I thought it’d be a bit spooky when the engines switched off as we were driving, but after a while I barely noticed it. There’s a computer display that shows you everything from your rate of fuel-efficiency to how long it’s been since your last oil change.

I really enjoyed our ride, but I’m wondering if that was because of the new-car smell and swish features as much as the eco-friendly advantages

Pros:

• it’s the best car for the environment that’s available in Australia: the Green Vehicle Guide rates it as number one in the Top 10 Performers, considering it’s fuel-efficiency, greenhouse-gas emissions and air-pollution.
• as a hybrid fuel-electric car, it could maybe be converted to an all-electric vehicle later on.
• by being early-adopters, we create a market for environmentally-friendly cars - the more people buy them, the more manufacturers will be encouraged to make models at different (i.e. cheaper) price points.
• it’s the right size for us - we could go smaller, but we wouldn’t go larger than this.

Cons:

• it’s expensive: the basic model, which is what we’d buy if we get one, costs $37,400 plus on-road costs (can anyone give me a rough estimate of on-road costs?).

So for us it comes down to whether or not we want to spend the money on the Prius. We can afford it, although we wouldn’t normally spend that kind of money on a car - we’ve always been the types to get secondhand cars. But as the Union of Concerned Scientists says:

“In some cases, a purchase of one item can reduce your consumption of other more environmentally damaging materials, especially fossil fuels. In other cases, you can be a leader who helps new environmentally beneficial products gain a foothold in the marketplace.”

Next step: test drive a standard fuel-efficient car, like the Toyota Yaris or Holden Astra.

Our car is getting old: at the time it rolled out the factory door, The Bangles had everyone walking like an Egyptian; and when we bought it Bill Clinton was still the President of the USA. So our cheap and cheerful small car is now expensive and grumpy. Its time to buy a new car.

The Union of Concerned Scientists says in their book The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices:

“Major, out-of-the-ordinary purchases have an especially important impact on your overall environmental profile. By being careful when making such consumer decisions, you can generally (even if not always) reduce environmental damage faster and more easily than through smaller, everyday actions.”

I don’t know about you, but some days I get a bit fed up with switching off lights and recycling my wine bottles - it seems like too little, too late. It feels good to do something huge instead, and make a big difference for a change.

So when it comes to buying a car, we want it to be as eco-friendly as we can manage. The UCS recommends that if you’re buying a car, you should try to choose:

• the right size for your everyday needs (ie not for your occasional holiday),
• the most fuel-efficient and least polluting in it’s class, and
• some eco-friendly features, if possible.

Our car isn’t luxurious, but it’s been a good fit for us for seven years. We usually get around 400km to a tank of petrol (about 40L) but that has been getting lower as the car gets older. This costs about $55-ish when we fill up each fortnight. We live close to the city, combine trips where possible, and I use public transport a lot. Once or twice a year we might drive it out to the country - either 500km up to Geraldton, or maybe 250km down south to Margaret River or somewhere like that.

We don’t need a large car, because we rarely carry large loads and we don’t have kids. We’re not rev-heads, so a performance vehicle isn’t what we’re after. Small to medium sized cars are a better fit for us.

So far we’ve tested a Prius (more on that later), we’re going to test-drive a Yaris (for a standard fuel-efficient model) and we’re still considering diesel and LPG alternatives. I’ll keep you posted on how we go…

For a couple of years now, we’ve been buying carbon-offsets for our car through Greenfleet. Each year we pay for them to plant 17 native trees in areas that used to be forested. The trees “offset” the carbon-dioxide emissions put out by our car, by using up carbon dioxide in their process of transpiration. This isn’t the most precise way to do things, because there are issues with sorting out the exact lifespan of the trees, variations in how much we drive, and so on. But it’s close enough, and since the trees also help with the problems of soil salinity, soil erosion, and provide habitat for native animals, we felt it was a worthwhile project to contribute to - there’s more to the environment than just global warming.

Greenfleet is available in most Aussie states, and you can either sign up for the standard car amount (which is what we did, because we’re kinda lazy that way), or use their emissions calculator to work out precisely how many GHG-emissions you’re contributing from your car, home or plane trips. Greenfleet is currently working to become compliant with the standards set out for offset programs in the Kyoto protocol and has applied for the federal government’s Greenhouse Friendly certification.

Other offset programs are available in Australia - some use tree-planting, some use renewable energy sources:

Greenfleet
Carbon Neutral
Climate Friendly
Elementree

Chris Judd, that’s who.

We saw him on the news (they were reporting on his groin-strain injury), getting into his car after a training session. And his car is a Prius. What a champion.

[And what a pity he's not playing for the Eagles today - as I write, it's the 3rd quarter of their game against St Kilda, and the scoreboard does not look good for Eagles fans.]