BXpress June 2007 by Marty. This is the section of the site to put forward your views or experiences on BX Ownership, past or present, or maybe to express your views or opinions. Last months' content is here We aim to produce a new BXpress article each month if we have time.

Carbon Clog Print?

The good lady wife says we need to reduce our carbon footprint (or Clogs if you live in Lancashire). I want aware I needed oder eaters in my shoes and took to the interweb to find out more. Basically everything I do in life is linked to churning out zillions of tonnes of carbon into the world and it appears that I am responsible for the world going to hell in a handbag - so says the wife as she goes round the house turning off lamps and turning down the heating and commanding I have showers instead of baths.

According to the interweb, the worse thing I can do is own an old car. Old cars are gas-guzzlers, old cars pollute, and old cars are uneconomical. In order to go green (and it would appear that Green is the new Black this year) I have to buy a nice new car, preferably a Unigate milk float and never fill up with nasty petrol ever again. Only then will I stop contributing to the greenhouse effect that has caused me to no longer have to have my heating on for 11 months of the year and means that I can get a tan in Blackpool instead of going rusty in the rain.

So off I went down to B and Q and filled the car with lots of insulating products and filled the loft, I got a nice man to drill holes in the wall of my house and fill it with more things to keep it warm. I installed a wood burner to burn off cuts of wood and general waste and heat the water for our shower (uses less than a leisurely soak you know!) I replaced all the light bulbs with energy saving ones (and find myself with eye strain for the first 5 minutes till they get to full brightness.) I fitted a rainwater butt to my downspouts and even worked out a way using the saved rainwater to flush the downstairs bog. I even have half a dozen different bins for things to be separated to make it easier to recycle, but still I wasn't being green enough apparently - I draw the line at a composting toilet and a big bushy moustache.

Strange men in suits through the magic of the media kept telling me that the 18-year-old car I was driving was causing all of the worlds ills… Its just not efficient they say, and it hasn't got a catholic converter on the exhaust. It's churning out too much carbon, and your making polar bears melt because you drive it.

But I retorted, the average car is built using about 20,000 million joules of energy (isn't the interweb wonderful?) and the average lifespan of a modern car is 10 years, and during this time the car will consume in fuel just 10% of the total energy it would have used in being created. To this end, simply buying a newer car because its got more toys and is supposedly more fuel-efficient just doesn't add up. The BX uses a simple and quite efficient normally aspirated fuel injection system, because it uses a system built by the Germans it will burn (almost) anything remotely oil based without trashing the fuel pump too badly. This means that with very little tweaking the car will run on vegetable oil - or bio diesel. This is as near to carbon neutral as makes no odds, so I'm not damaging the ozone layer or causing seals to lie around the Artic saying "phwor, what a scorcher". My wife has a 3 year old diesel, and it wont run on anything even slightly thick and stodgy like cooking oil without expensively breaking - and this is called progress…. Despite nearly 20 years difference between the cars the older one actually returns more MPG than the newer one. This is probably down to the newer one being "safer" and loaded with scaffolding poles in the doors, minor explosives in the dashboard to throw bags into your face and things called "crumple zones" that mean anything more than a 5mph shunt in Sainsbury's car park and the car is written off.

The other thing is - just how long do you need to run a car for to reach the break even point in terms of what it consumed to be made?
Cars these days are being treated like cheap DVD players from the far east, in fact a number of cars these days are cheap things from the Far East - most people would not think twice about repairing a £14.99 DVD player when (and it will) packs up. It goes in the bin (and this benefits the environment how exactly?). The same goes for a lot of cars - there reaches a point in its life where the owner simply feels that repair is not worth the money and he would be better using his £500 to put down a deposit on a new bland machine which is three times as glib as his old one… So another car having consumed gazillions of watts of power being made and belching out tonnes of carbon takes a slow boat to China and becomes next year's washing machines.
Rather than take the expensive option to recycle a car (use another forest to fire the furnaces and melt it down to be used again) I prefer the option of using old bits on a car someone else is going to throw away and re use them - this means my own car lasts that bit longer and the other car doesn't cause quite as much land fill. I am responsible with the nasty oily bits and dispose of them how I should do. Same with the tyres and whenever possible I buy remoulds for the same reason (that and they cost a bit less too).

So, who is being greener here? The chap who keeps his car in good order, checking oil and water and maintaining it well so that it lasts longer than its anticipated 10 years of life, or the Mondeo man, who never pops the bonnet (despite it being serviced every 2 years, whether it needs it or not) and after 3 or 4 years replaces it with a glibber model. Or indeed the motorist who scraps his perfectly good car for the want of a few quid spent at MOT time? No - the motor industry wants us to buy new cars because it keeps them in nice suits and holidays in the Cayman Islands, and they do this under the guise that the car you bought 5 years ago is now harming the environment - this despite the fact at the time the car you bought 5 years ago was heralded as a marvel of modern technology and oh, wasn't it dreadfully fuel efficient too? If you doubt that modern motors are no nearer fuel-efficient than older ones, look at the fuel consumption figures for the latest diesel Jaguar? Is it getting more than 50 MPG on an average run? No, thought not - and again that's progress is it?

I am taking a leaf out of my grandfather's book - he was brought up in an era where you used things until they were worn out, then if you couldn't repair them, you replaced them. He did this all his life and always had more money than I do. Not only that but he enjoyed long leisurely hot baths rather than showers. That's why I'm keeping my 18-year-old diesel.