It’s a strange phenomenon, but low emission cars aren’t what they used to be. In fact, they’re better than ever – and emissions are gradually being reduced to tiny amounts, but what it is interesting is that it’s now happening across the whole of the motoring industry.
In the late 1990s, Toyota and Honda were in the vanguard of low emission technology with the first production hybrid vehicles – the Prius and the Insight. Both these cars are still going strong, and through their various generations they have improved on mileage, electric motor capability and reduction of emissions. Now, the new focus for hybrid technology is plug-in hybrids – so that the electric motor takes on even more of the effort, and the internal combustion engine can become secondary.
However, at the same time, all car manufacturers have been busy perfecting the electric vehicles. We’ve now got EVs with fairly decent range before their battery needs another charge, charge times are reduced and gradually an infrastructure for EV charging is being established across different nations.
While alternatives to petrol and diesel gain ground, there has also been increased fuel efficiency and reduced emissions from the new conventional cars. Diesels score particularly well on both, partially because they’re rated only for CO2 emissions and not other emissions like nitrous oxide and particulates. That aside, the numbers can’t lie – the fuel economy that you can get on some conventional cars today is phenomenal, as is the reduction in CO2 emissions.
Developments like stop start technology really help to cut emissions and can be applied across the board – to conventional petrol and diesel engines as well as to hybrid vehicles.
Added in to the mix, we’ve seen the development of alternative fuels like hydrogen and natural gas – again reducing emissions. Hydrogen has already been hailed as the fuel of the future by many in the motoring industry as the only tailpipe emission it creates is good old H2O – or steam vapour!
