Is keeping my old car going better for the environment?

It seems obvious: change your aged petrol or diesel car for a shiny new electric model and you’ll be doing your bit for the environment. Annoyingly, the reverse seems equally obvious — keeping the car you’ve got healthy and running will surely be less damaging to the environment than asking a vast car factory to churn out a new one for you, electric or otherwise.

So which is it? Keep the old car going or buy the new electric vehicle (EV)? The answer is complex, but the advantage seems to lie with the electric car.

The maths goes something like this — creating a new electric car, according to the European Parliament’s figures, causes the emissions of about 10 tonnes of CO2, with the construction of the car’s battery accounting for most of that. The parliament, in a report into CO2 emissions, calculated that you’ll produce about 15-tonnes of CO2 emissions just from burning the petrol in your regular car for 150,000km. Let’s say you do half of that mileage during your ownership of the car, so you’re accounting for 7.5-tonnes of CO2 emissions. Your car will have needed about five tonnes of emissions to have been built in the first place, and the upstream production of fuel will account for about three to four tonnes more.

Electricity production

Assuming you bought the car new, and have driven it for 75,000km, then you’re already in the debit column compared to a new EV. Okay, so the production of electricity needed to run that EV causes carbon emissions, but wind and solar power are increasingly helping to trim that. Equally, many car makers are now claiming that their factories run on renewable energy, making their cars carbon neutral at the point of manufacture (although there’s a caveat — there are still some offsetting carbon credits involved in that, which is a problematic area at best).

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What do the experts say? Rachel O’Toole, from Nifti Business car leasing, told The Irish Times: “We have provided an increasing number of EVs to business customers over the last three years and businesses are showing a huge interest in switching some or all of their fleets to electric vehicles. It’s clear that electric is the future, evidenced in government policies and in fact by people’s own commitment to sustainability. Technology is improving rapidly. The range of options is expanding hugely with manufacturers increasingly focused on EV production. The impact on carbon emissions of driving an EV is immediate and powerful. We can demonstrate this through a comparative analysis of an existing combustion engine vehicle versus an electric equivalent. An analysis of the whole life costs also demonstrates a typically favourable comparison and that too can have a ripple effect on emissions.”

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The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland has a riposte to those who use the “we burn coal to make electricity” argument too, saying: “When you calculate the carbon emissions of charging an EV, you need to consider the renewable energy in the electricity grid. The amount of carbon in the electricity that is going into the EV will depend on the mix of renewables on the grid at the time of charging. As the overall number of renewables on the grid is around 40 per cent, the carbon in the electricity will be reduced. To compare, there will be constant carbon emissions pumped out of a petrol or diesel car.”

Emissions problem

Have we come up with a definitive answer, then? Sort of — if you are buying a new car, buy an electric one. No matter how many calculations you do, you’re immediately cutting your own personal CO2 emissions. Let the car makers worry about the emissions from making the car — that’s their problem to deal with. Equally, no matter how many emissions your car and its battery took to build in the first place, they are recyclable — the metals and chemicals in the battery almost endlessly so — whereas once you’ve burned a litre of petrol or diesel, that’s it, it can’t be used again and the carbon has been released with no recourse.

If you’re only covering a tiny annual mileage, and have no interest in buying a new car, then that’s fine, stick with what you’ve got. If you’re buying new, though, start thinking electric.