If greener cars rank high on your list of priorities for tackling climate change, the Detroit Motor Show in January must have been something of a disappointment. Beleaguered US auto makers do not appear ready for a wholesale move into the smaller car market, despite the country’s pending legislation that will demand a 40% reduction in average fuel consumption by 2020.
Alternative fuels were a highlight, with ethanol leading the field, but we all know to our cost what ‘growing’ (on a large geographical scale), rather than ‘drilling’, for automotive fuels has done for world livestock feed – and hence retail food - prices. And, of course, the word ‘hybrid’ was bandied about a lot at the show; but US hybrids are big cars with big engines – and they are generally still at the concept stage, years away from the showroom.
At the Geneva Motor Show this week, things are marginally better, though the high-end, luxury gas-guzzler sector still attracts the drooling crowds with its six-figure price tags, seven litre capacity engines and barely two-figure average fuel consumption statistics. It’s clearly a niche market, and presumably a lucrative one, but it is an ostentatious excess all the same.
Road transport globally is a source of around 16% of man-made CO2 emissions, coming third after electricity & heating and manufacturing (aviation is between 2 and 4% globally, according to which statistical source you prefer to follow). Efforts to reduce road transport emissions through technological advances in engine design are all well and good, but are likely to be offset by steadily increasing global demand for cars, particularly in regions of rapid economic growth such as China and India. Recent arrivals like the micro-sized, micro-priced Tata Nano (also making its Geneva debut this week) brings motoring within the realm of millions who might otherwise miss out on a freedom we take for granted in the West. While environmentalists might scowl at this development – the developing world’s carbon footprint is getting larger, after all - on a per-capita basis, we in the West remain by far the biggest CO2 polluters.
The five biggest car markets in Europe have, year-on-year, seen a steady decline in vehicle emissions; it’s fractions of a gram per kilometre, but at least it’s going in the right direction. However, at a current average of around 160g/km, there’s still a long way to go if the car makers are to meet the EU’s proposed target of 125g/km by 2015. The average fuel consumption of cars sold in Europe has decreased by more than 12% in just ten years. But then vehicle weight has increased by more than 16% in the same period because of the need to improve vehicle safety and meet other legal requirement, all of which have put counter-productive pressure on efforts to reduce CO2 emissions.
But ‘small’ is the buzzword in Geneva this year; even the much-criticised Chelsea tractor sector is downsizing, with smaller versions of several well-known SUV brands now coming on to the market. And, compared with the US, European and Asian manufacturers seem to be a bit quicker off the mark with new automotive technology. Apart from the bio-fuelled and hybrid drive variants that are already in the showrooms, there are some interesting concepts based on hydrogen fuel cell technology, the most prominent among them being Morgan’s ‘Lifecar’ – an ‘emission-free’ sports car, which really does get the imagination going.
Based on the Morgan Aero Eight and powered by proton exchange membrane fuel cells currently under development by QinetiQ, the only waste product that this car will produce is water. Morgan’s development group, comprising teams from Cranfield and Oxford Universities, and commercial partners, BOC, OSCar and QinetiQ, have brought automotive hydrogen fuel cell technology that much closer to commercial realisation.
Thanks to a super-efficient design that involved a radical re-think in terms of automotive architecture and weight reduction, a fuel cell producing just 24kW is all that is needed to power this car, as opposed to 85kW currently proposed for other concept platforms. Moreover, the electrical energy recovered from regenerative braking systems will be used to charge a bank of ‘ultra-capacitors’ that satisfy peak energy demands when accelerating.
It’s a two-year project which we all hope will succeed - not only providing a rather special car, but a commercial technology that can be spun out to perhaps less exotic modes of transport. Now that’s something to be optimistic about.
Les Hunt
Editor
PS – Reader Helen Duncan was prompted by my last newsletterto tell us about her experiences:
“It’s easy to say that using engineers as ambassadors in school is the best way forward, but personally I feel it’s the attitude of the teachers that needs converting first as, after parents, they have the biggest day-to-day influence on the pupils. More than 10 years ago I volunteered as a Neighbourhood Engineer for the (then) IEE, and was assigned to the local comprehensive school that my daughter was about to start at. Eventually I gave up in frustration at the outdated attitude of the Head of Design Technology who insisted that engineering was only for the less bright kids who were ‘good with their hands’. He didn’t even know the difference between a technician and an engineer, and – worse – wasn’t prepared to listen to my opinion on the subject at all. I got the impression he felt that if the pupils realised you had to be clever to be an engineer too, then ‘his’ kids – the ones destined for low-level technical jobs – would feel disenfranchised. His electronics lab [lacked] PCs, which were all in the ICT and Graphics Design departments. The ICT course, incidentally, seemed far more geared to ensuring the pupils were competent in Microsoft Office than in any real IT skills such as programming. My daughter, although bright at maths and science, sadly chose a career in law because she perceived it offered better status.
The situation in independent schools is dramatically different, thankfully. Because of his aptitude at Maths my son was offered a scholarship at an independent school where the attitude to technology is far more balanced. He is now in his GCSE year there, and planning to do A-levels in Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry. Until recently he was keen to study Physics at University, which I was happy about, but last term attended a ‘Gifted and Talented’ day in London, at which he was totally inspired by a talk on Nanotechnology. With a bit of encouragement from me he’s now realised that an Electronics course would probably be the best route into this. So I hope it’s not premature for me to feel smug that I’ve finally made a small personal contribution to easing the electronics skills shortage.
Interestingly the guest speaker at my son’s prizegiving ceremony last summer was Jo Salter, the UK’s first female fighter pilot, who said that she’d wanted to be a hairdresser until a talk associated with WISE Year opened her eyes to the possibilities and she took an engineering degree instead. Her statement that ‘with an engineering degree you can do almost anything’ was certainly an eye-opener to quite a few of the pupils. So ambassadors can work, but only if the scene has already been set by the school having the right attitude.
Incidentally my own career choice – very rare for a girl in the 1970s – was made easier by the fact that my father was a mechanical engineer and he shared his enthusiasm for all things technical with me (possibly because I was an only child so he didn’t have a son). I was even taken to a machine tools exhibition at the age of 10, and can remember being spellbound by the sight of one of the earliest CNC machines!”
My thanks to Helen for taking the trouble to write. Do you have similar experiences? Let us know. LH