What makes a Green car green – How to make sense of Green credentials
If you’re looking for an eco-friendly car, you’ll also be well aware of the fact that calling a car “green” doesn’t make it green in fact. The new Green ratings are an improvement, but you still need to know your stuff to understand the ratings system. Green credentials include calculating everything related to your car, including car service, on road costs as well as energy sources.
The Green rating
Typically Green car ratings are created for a class of vehicles. The ratings are based on standardized testing conducted by manufacturers, a fact not all Green people are entirely happy about.
The basic tests include:
• Greenhouse gases rating- CO2 emissions
• Air pollution rating- Pollutants like carbon monoxide, hydrocarbon (fuel-based) emissions, and nitrogen oxide, another toxic gas
• Star rating- Somewhat like an energy star rating for an appliance, based on the emissions factors
As an example of a rating, the Toyota Prius, the standard bearer for the current generation of Green cars, rates ten out of ten.
Many dedicated environmentally conscious people might dispute these ratings, but the fact is that any rating system has to be based on a clearly defined systemic approach. This system may or may not leave out things like carbon particulate emissions and be short on other information, depending on your level of technical knowledge of particular cars.
Checking Green car credentials properly
The current generation of Green cars are hybrids and the new electric cars now coming on the road. A realistic check of Green credentials therefore involves some number crunching as well as technical information. If you can find out the engine specifications and filter capacity of a car, you can pin down the actual Green factor in any car.
The sad fact is that most older cars put out a minimum about 50g per mile (slightly under30g per kilometer, roughly) of carbon. That includes some of the hybrids, which although they’re at the bottom end of this scale and the Toyota Prius is definitely best of its class, is still a lot of carbon. Fuel efficiency is definitely a factor in Green credentials, and more fuel efficient cars are considerably Greener than the big cars, quite literally every second they’re on the road.
The electric cars are naturally Green in terms of common definitions involving fuel-based calculations, but naturally, the generation of electricity has a role to play in their real Green values. If your source of electricity is solar or another alternative power generation system, your electric car is truly Green. If you’re sourcing electricity from a coal powered electricity generator, the car is contributing to emissions from that source, albeit in a minimal way.
There’s another way of determining Green car credentials- On road costs. Real Green cars, particularly electric cars, are considerably cheaper than gas guzzlers. If you total up your on road costs including car insurance, you should see a notable improvement in your car budget real costs over a time frame of a year.
Check out your car online, and compare with the top Green cars. You’ll soon see where the real Green credentials are.
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