New cars can be worse polluters

We can only rely, to a certain extent, on new cars as supposedly being more environmentally friendly, as long as they remain the same cars that once came out of the factory!

The first thing that many car enthusiasts do after they take a brand new car from the showroom is to stop at a tyre service station to change its tyres and make it look more sporty. So they have already started polluting our environment.

Then they throw away the silencer and part of the exhaust system and replace it all with a four-inch diameter and very noisy tube thus adding more to the noise pollution.

Then they also add a spoiler or two, and unfortunately, sometimes they really spoil its overall appearance. But anyhow, that is not the point I would like to raise. A spoiler of a Formula 1 car, which is the result of years of research, is one thing, but when spoilers are fixed unprofessionally and added just to make cars look sporty, they may actually be creating more drag or turbulence rather than improving the performance. This leads to further pollution.

After some time they may even upgrade their engines, making them more powerful and noisy, thus further polluting the environment. But it's a new car, they tell you!

Then there is the question of engine size and transmission. Monstrous vehicles, especially if they are permanent four-wheel drives, use a lot of power which obviously leads to more exhaust. But they're new, they tell you again!

Now when it comes to climate change, here is where the real misconceptions start. As carbon dioxide (CO2), the culprit greenhouse gas polluter, is the by-product of every combustion, including the internal combustion engines that depend on fossil fuels, it makes little difference whether the car is old or new. CO2 is colourless and odourless and has nothing to do with the black, cancerous smoke we often see coming out of badly tuned or worn out engines.

Ironically, new cars that come fitted with catalytic converters can produce even more CO2 than older cars because the catalyst's job is to convert the highly toxic carbon monoxide into the dioxide.

Even more ironically, worn out or badly serviced engines will be less efficient in the combustion of the fuel alkanes (carbon molecules) into CO2 as most of the carbon compounds become incompletely burnt to carbon monoxide (instead of the dioxide) which although is toxic to human health, does not contribute to humanity's fate vis-a-vis climate change.

Finally, before condemning old cars, one also has to consider their mileage rather than their actual age.

A 20-year old car's engine that is often garaged and serviced properly may only have 50,000 miles on its record, whereas a two-year old car may have already clocked the 50,000 mark. Which is the new engine in this case? But that is an old car and this one is new, they tell you!

I think that if the government is really concerned about the global issue of climate change, the fairest tax on cars should be based on the principle of: "the more CO2 you produce, the more you have to pay".

However, if the government is looking for alternative, easy revenue, then it's a whole new story altogether. But for God's sake, let not the government use the climate change issue to its advantage.