Morris Minor Owners Club

Ooops - wrong board - will repost on General Discussion

This may be a stupid question, but I'm sure there will be some opinions...

I've been out and about in CC today and got the usual amount of 'My dad used to have one of these' people coming up and admiring. I then had the one miserable old (person) say 'There's only one problem with them ... polluting'.

My understanding is that driving a moggy is more environmentally friendly than a new car in the fact that there is so much pollution from simple construction of a new car (I think I read a while back that the Toyota Prius caused more pollution than it saved in its construction ... but stand to be corrected on this).

Does anyone know if there is a CO2 emissions figure for a standard Morris Minor? I've trawled the web, but couldn't find anything.

Cars account for 0.5% of global co2, so sleep easy.The carbon used to make your mog has already been offset so don't worry.The Toyota pious used more fuel than a BMW M3 going round the Top Gear test track.All this mumbo jumbo is dreamed up by politicians to tax us all to death and unfortunately some people such as you encountered swallow the hype.

There is also considerable doubt that the CO2 is doing any harm! It seems to have been far higher in the past! You can rest assured that the emissions (of all kinds of junk - not just CO2) from China/India etc far far exceed any emissions all the Morris Minors in the world running constantly at full throttle could ever make!

Exactly!

Ignoring Co2 and global warming for now... the particle, CO and NOx emmissions from an old Carb engine will be significantly worse than a modern car. These do affect the air quality in a city.

However, as per CO2, cars are not the worst culprits. Household pollution is far higher than cars. Gas powered boilers (e.g. hot water and central heating) are pumping out emmissions 24/7 and nobody seems to worry.

Backn to CO2. The Minor will be somewhere around 160 on tailpipe emmissions. Whereas it's not hard to beat that figure on a modern car (most cars actually don't, but that's changing rapidly) the materials and processes used to make a new car create a huge amount of emmissions. Any Hybrid or electric car contains all kinds of really nasty components in the batteries - so may be creating a serious environmental issue at cradle and grave (mineral extraction is not a clean industry, processing involves masses of energy, and end of life disposal is not going to be any better)