The Dream Machine

Cars that emit cleaner air than they intake

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

04/14/03

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/pzevs.htm

Most people don’t know this – I didn’t – but there are cars available that use existing engines and burn gasoline, and run so clean that the emissions are actually cleaner than the freeway air they take in!

The cars, which use existing technology, are simply put together a bit more thoroughly, and have a few modest improvements on items that cars already have, such as catalytic converters, vapor traps, and computerized fuel control.

How much do these modest changes, which add between $200 and $400 to the base sticker price of a car, reduce emissions?

At least ninety percent. Often more. Never less.

You read that right. Emissions from these cars are less than one tenth those of the standard models. They require no special fuel, and any mechanic qualified to do emissions testing can work on them.

The Sacramento Bee did a piece on these cars in their April 13^th front section ("Clean cars on a roll, quietly" by Chris Bowman), and among other amazing bits of information they had was the fact that these cars actually run cleaner than the "hybrid" models, such as the Toyota and the Honda.

You might we wondering when these cars will be on the market. You may even feel a slight sense of cynicism, since you’ve heard endless promises of revolutionary new autos "coming real soon" that inevitably never seem to come about. (In the software industry, this is called "vaporware". In the field of pollution controls, perhaps it should be called "no-vaporware"). And like most well-trained consumers, you are already cringing at the blast of media hype and advertising that will accompany these miracle cars.

So when are they coming to market?

They already have. They’ve been on the market for over a year, They’ve sold over 100,000 of these cars. If you live in a state with strict air-quality standards and emission control laws, and you bought a new car in the past year, you might actually be driving one of these and not even know it.

According to Matthew’s article, car dealers are downplaying and even concealing the nature of these cars. In many instances, the only way a prospective buyer can tell if he is getting one of the low-emission cars or a regular model is by looking at the dealer code at the bottom of the sticker, or by looking at – and understanding – the emissions figures on the air pollution data label under the hood.

They run like regular cars, and while they get slightly better mileage, the difference in consumption isn’t all that great. Nor is the technology flawed; according to Matthews, most of the companies that make these cars are offering 15 year warrantees, which covers the normal lifetime of a car.

Who is making these cars?

Honda. Volkswagen. BMW. Toyota. Volvo. Nissan. And Ford. There may be others – Chevrolet is conspicuous by its absence on the Bee list – but the models that are listed make up a sizeable percentage of the cars sold each year in America – the 325 series, the Focus, the Accord, the Civic, the Sentray, the Camry, the Jetta, and the S60 and V70 series.

If this is news to you (and much of it was news to me), then the question you must be asking is "Why haven’t we heard about this?"

Bowman’s piece contains a hint at the answer in the flat statement, "Smog control, no matter how effective, is not a key selling point for most American buyers, manufacturers contend."

For readers outside the United States, the following statement is going to utterly defy belief. Canadians and Europeans are not subjected to the constant bombardment of slick, well-funded, psychologically buttressed and pervasive propaganda that Americans are. They don’t know how much Americans have become creatures of the corporate will.

Here in the United States, "environmentally friendly" is seen as a negative. Joe Six Pack, whose eyes bug him on smoggy days and whose kids have asthma, will vocificerously denounce anyone who suggests stronger particulate controls on Diesel trucks. Never mind that Joe doesn’t drive a Diesel, will feel no particular impact from such regulations, and might have cleaner air and healthier kids; he’s utterly convinced, via Rush Limbaugh and a host of other propagandists, that any effort to improve emissions is the work of america-hating, anti-capitalist, tofu-eating tree hugging socialist weinies who, unlike any normal human being, hate success. And Joe will side with the "truck drivers" (who are already getting screwed by the same companies that subsidize Rush) and wax lyrical about the need to keep these kings of the road safe from bureaucratic intervention.

I’m used to this attitude, living as I do in an area where timber was recently the main industry. The companies devoted millions of dollars and man-hours to convincing the local population that it was "enviros" and the spotted owl that ruined the timber industry, and not market forces. People are utterly convinced that the moratorium on logging in "owl circles" on federal lands is what caused all those mills to close.

If you point out that over 80% of the mill closures occurred during the 1980s, before the Dwyer decision and back when logging was at record HIGH levels, they react (usually) with astonishment. Mills were closing then because new mills were more adaptable and efficient, and used computers, and required less men to cut a greater variety of sizes of board. (In the late eighties, when there was much more wood flowing out of the forests, quite a bit of it had to be shipped overseas for milling, since local mills couldn’t be set up to cut to metric specifications. It took a while for them to change, since right wing American bloody-mindedness insists that the metric system is just a passing fad that died in the 1970s). It wasn’t regulations that cost all those jobs; it was pure market forces; greater efficiency and less source material.

They get mad when you tell them this. But they don’t get mad at the people who lied to them and cheated them. They get mad because you are spreading commie propaganda and being a trouble maker.

There is a perception in America that anything that is environmentally friendly is weak, effete, and probably hurts the economy. Joe Six Pack doesn’t make a dime off the sacrifices he makes in terms of his health and happiness, mind you. But he has a vague notion that if he lets the corporations make massive profits, somewhere down the line, they’ll they’ll be nice to Joe for it.

People will avoid the new, cleaner cars because they are cleaner. Cleaner can’t be good. Give them a smoke-belching behemoth to make them feel like Real Americans™. A glance at our truck ads will show that the auto companies just love that mindset. Ain’t nuthin’ more manly and patriotic than a big, ugly truck that gets 16 miles to the gallon. And don’t give those good old boys any of that kilometer per liter crap, neither. Real Americans™ don’t go for that French measurement stuff. Just a passing fad among the tofu eating tree huggers.

So the dealers actually conceal the "clean" nature of these cars because it will actually hurt sales..

Anyone who doubts the power of propaganda need only watch the average dittohead operating against his own best interests in order to support people who are robbing him blind.

Incidently, another reason the manufacturers don’t like to broadcast the existence of these cars is that they are proof that government pressure can result in better products. California was the first state to pass laws mandating that a percentage of the fleet of cars sold in 10 years must be Zero Emission Vehicles (ZEVs). This would include electric, fuel cell, solar and pixie dust cars. As time passed and this goal became less and less attainable, the State came up with an inspired solution: they would give credit for vehicles that emitted less than 10% what the fleet average was. Such vehicles could have been called Very Low Emission Vehicles, or even Ultra Low Emission Vehicles, but in a burst of logical and grammatical idiocy, they named the vehicles "Partial Zero Emission Vehicles" or PZEVs.

Doesn’t matter. PZEVs were attainable, and the results are in showrooms now. Not surprisingly, it was the foreign manufacturers who led the way, since for them, clean cars were not considered undesirable, and cooperation with government was not seen as weakness or some sort of betrayal of Ayn Randriod beliefs.

Here in California, with tens of thousands of these new cars on the road, improvements in air quality are already starting.

And the drivers, Real Americans™ that they are, are happy as clams, convinced that they are driving old-fashioned smoke pots, and are thus keeping that American Dream alive.