French emissions tax for new cars

[johnmc]

Hi All,
Our EU pals in France are introducing a new emissions charge for all new cars that emit
more than 166g/km of CO2. The charge is £1,850 (not Euros). This is roughly the same as Band E upwards in the UK system. I saw on the news today that the EU will fine any car maker that fails to meet the new emissions goals by 2012. The fleet average today for all new cars shipped in Europe (2007) is about 165g/km.

To bring this into perspective, a Ford Focus 1.8 Petrol will pay this tax, as would a Merc A200 petrol. Every E-Class will pay the tax.

The EU goal is a brand fleet weighted average (EG all cars made by Merc weighted by volume) of under 130g/km by 2012, then 100g/km by 2020. This is a fleet average of Band C or lower in 2012, then Band A by 2020. Apparently Merc are lined up for hefty fines and are the furthest behind due to their lack of investment in clean engine technology, like direct petrol injection.

BMW have introduced a raft of small cars with amazing performance and low emissions and are well on the way. The new 120D coupe will pull 62mph in 7.5secs but does just under 60mpg (claimed). No Merc can compete with it. What's likely to happen to Merc?

I think:
- We'll see a raft of hybrids for the E-class and up.
- More focus on decent small Mercs.
- Possible rationing of big engined cars from Merc to balance their portfolio to 130g/km.
- Petrol injection, finally Merc will catch up? I read that they have a new technology for injection to allow very small engines to be used in big cars, but it's at least five years out.
- 4x4 begin to vanish or get heavily rationed? Even the hybrid 4x4s will struggle, even the Lexus 400h is 192g/km. Maybe Diesel Hybrids will work well enough?

Anyone know what Merc will do?

John

 

[hawk20]

Firstly, shouldn't this be in the general interest forum. Hard to think of anything that could be of more interest to Mercedes owners generally and to all car owners.

Incredible target. Even my diesel A class does not meet the target which is only 4-5 years away. Lunatics.

 

[dieselman]

Incredible target. Even my diesel A class does not meet the target which is only 4-5 years away. Lunatics.

I bet the 2012 version will though...

 

[hawk20]

I bet the 2012 version will though...

Agreed. But do you want to take bets on the E320cdi?
The C63AMG?

 

[dieselman]

Forget anything petrol powered, it won't exist...

Just watch the depreciation curve on petrol cars now.....

 

[television]

Forget anything petrol powered, it won't exist...

Just watch the depreciation curve on petrol cars now.....

I have not got that long to live to worry about it

 

[jon_harley]

I bet the 2012 version will though...

I think you hit the nail on the head. This will stimulate sales of new cars when it comes in. Countries which still make cars will benefit.

 

[hawk20]

I think you hit the nail on the head. This will stimulate sales of new cars when it comes in. Countries which still make cars will benefit.

Or it might stimulate the sale of secondhand cars if they are the only way to get pleasurable performance.

Since the ruling only applies to European car-makers (is it only cars made in EU or only cars made by EU based manufacturers?)(surely should have applied to all makes sold in EU?), the easy way round it for performance cars is to make them elsewhere. The US for example. Depending on the precise wording of the legislation it may be necesary to base the company elsewhere too. India and Range Rovers and Jaguars could be exempt?

 

[dieselman]

Or it might stimulate the sale of secondhand cars if they are the only way to get pleasurable performance.

Or advancement of technology, which is much more likely. Powerpants as we know them are inefficient and low performance. This will be improved and combined with other technologies to provide better performance.

Manufacturers will only do this when legislation and market forces require them to as they don't want to spend the money developing higher efficency drivetrains.

 

[hawk20]

Or advancement of technology, which is much more likely. Powerpants as we know them are inefficient and low performance. This will be improved and combined with other technologies to provide better performance.

Manufacturers will only do this when legislation and market forces require them to as they don't want to spend the money developing higher efficency drivetrains.

On that we shall have to disagree. I think BMW and Mercedes spend huge effort and money developing new technology and improving engines. The recent introduction of new diesels at BMW has brought quite amazing performance plus economy to the market. And in 2008 we shall see the new Merc diesels which will be, so they say, the cleanest and most economical diesels in the world. The current 320cdi is a staggeringly good diesel IMO and offers from only 3 litres the same performance as the 3.5 litre petrols. More than that it offers such quietness, smoothness and all round refinement as I never ever expected to come from a diesel. Can't wait to see what next year's diesels will be like!

 

[dieselman]

Disagreeing doesn't alter the facts. Internal combustion engines as we know them are relatively inefficient, petrol is 25% efficient at best and passenger car diesels are ~43%. Lorry engines are about 47% and large marine engines about 50%.

Electric motors are about 85-90% efficient and provide full torque from zero revs to nearly maximum revs. To obtain the same performance from a petrol engine as an electric motor you require 3 x the power output.

In addition engines with fixed valve operation (i.e. using camshafts) are only efficient for a small rev range.

There is a lot that can be done to improve efficiency but it requires investment. one solution would be to have diesel/electric cars.

The engine runs at peak efficiency all the time it's required and there is not drivetrain as the electric motor acts directly on the driveshaft. The engine would be quieter due to having softer engine mounts and efficieny would improve.

Why is this not already in existance..cost.

 

[hawk20]

The problems with electricity are well known. Big losses in generation and transmission are amongst them. But biggest of all with electricity in cars is the extreme weight and cost of batteries to store the electricity. An absolute fortune has been spent, and is still being spent on trying to solve the problems with electric motors in cars.

 

[dieselman]

You'd probably have quite a job fitting the diesel engine in as well as all those batteries you mention, I guess..:?

 

[oilychariot]

stuck in the mud?

Or advancement of technology, which is much more likely. Powerpants as we know them are inefficient and low performance. This will be improved and combined with other technologies to provide better performance.

Manufacturers will only do this when legislation and market forces require them to as they don't want to spend the money developing higher efficency drivetrains.

I think 'powerplants' are inefficient and of low performance because of the excess size and weight of the bodies they have to lug around. This should be the easiest solution in the medium term - the idea of a safe car being one which feels like a fortress is overdue for revision. Any half-decent piece of engineering is as light as possible, whether a bridge or aircraft. Engine related parts are already fault-prone and unecessarily difficult to repair through the excessive application and complication of electronic componentry - further development is unlikely to simplify this problem.

Items like electric seat motors and other excessively heavy and unnecessary bits and pieces should logically be the first to disappear. The Japanese, VW-Audi group and Ford are likely to remain in the medium term - far beyond that, technology will have changed to the extent that many manufacturers of today will have disappeared while others which have yet to emerge will be giants.

The best chance of survival is by keeping engineers abreast with technology but more importantly keeping their minds open to the impossible - so that when it happens, they can have a head start. The Japanese are excellent at this. The link between designer/engineer and production is fast disappearing to the extent that several companies exist simply to build cars to a company's design.

Cars such as the original Mini (for the urbanised 'West') and the 2CV (for where strength, dual-purpose practicality and longevity matter most) should be studied long and hard by the engineers - there is a lot to be learnt from these clever designs. After all, the rules of physics and mechanics never change, once a good design is established (eg 1934 Citroen 'Traction Avant') only refinement, reliability and profit are left to be enhanced. Except for the cross-wise installation of the power unit a Ford Focus is exactly the same machine as the '34 French car - monocoque shell, strong suspension location, a wheel at each corner, front-drive, rising-rate springing, fine stability and handling and as streamlined as the general public of the time accept.

Frequently designers become lazy until there is a big shake-up of the rules - as well-illustrated by the vehicles which appeared after the war: Land-Rover, Mini, Morris Minor, Citroen 2CV, DS all set new targets for others to struggle to match in design terms, if not production quality. They were everything 95% of cars hadn't been prewar - cheap, tough, reliable, safe-handling and easy to drive. The 124 Mercedes is probably one of the late 20th century's classic pieces of design - aerodynamic, safe-handling, affordable, roomy and simple. And therefore long-lasting - the ultimate car for the 'environment'.



Reality is stranger than fiction: why no serious policy for self-reliance on energy - instead of Russian gas, French electricity and resorting to more, expensive nukes backing up windmills (impossible as nuclear power stations have to run flat out all the time, they cannot be switched on when the wind drops - this sums up the awfully naive government of the day. If they are reading - hint: we are surrounded by the fastest flowing and highest tides in the world - which continue as long as the Moon rotates the Earth.) Where are the exhaust emission tests on central heating boilers, portable generators and open fires? Where is the heavy taxation on aviation? Or should that question be reversed - why the punitive taxation on personal transport, why are the nation's drivers so apathetic in resisting swingeing taxes? Motor car designers will attempt to beat the rules with inefficient hybrids for larger vehicles and continue to fix their figures to the politicians' targets, making cars even less driveable and more impossible to repair.

On the subject of electric motors, I think I read somewhere that a Japanese manufacturer (could have been Mitsubishi) already has in-hub motors ready for application in the motor car. Porsche, being an electrician, demonstrated this technology in one of his first cars.

Maybe a highly efficient piston engine or turbine could be the on-board power unit to help recharge the stored power in long-distance cars, at least until power cells and/or solar tech has evolved sufficiently? Using electric motors to drive a car through a gearbox is a bit daft given their ability to provide high torque at zero revs - hub motors displace gearboxes, clutches, driveshafts and so much else besides, and weight loss is self-perpetuating. I am amazed at how the motor car has slowly slid behind other forms of motive power in its development - even a council's lawnmower will have hydraulically-powered in-hub motors. Individula in-hub motors are individually controllable with no limit to positioning or suspension displacements - many present constraints could be wiped away at a stroke. How quaint it is that beneath the computers, head-up displays and silent logging of your speed and whereabouts in the 'modern' car, there remain reciprocating pistons, valves operated by spinning lobed shafts, synchromeshed gears engaging and disengaging, steel springs and hydraulic dampers bucking around, driveshafts and differentials linking gears and suspension together. So much of this could be seen operating in the mills of the 18th and 19th Century!

The stringent rules need to be be tough - in a proper shake-up the advance of technology dictates that some will go out of business/merge if Europe is to remain at all competitive in the world. The great danger of the EU is that it prevents the traditional home of ideas and culture from evolving in real time - the cost of protectionism is constantly being realised in the USA, but expectations are lower there than elsewhere in the world - bigger is still better, not a good philosophy for the 21st Century. Only when there is a sudden and large change in the rules (as after WW2) and the engineers are given free thought - as in Japan - will the motor car cease to be an easy way of making a living for cost accountants and a source of real pleasure once again for the consumer.

 

[dieselman]

Your post is a bit long and winding to comment too much on but for info, the in wheel motors are manufactured by PML Flightlink and are going to be used in the new 'Lightning' electric car.
The Tesla roadster is going to make do with a high efficiency single motor connected to a differential.

Current cars are indeed too heavy due to using cheap materials to build them from, sheet steel. This presents another problem in that to achieve a minimum thickness on bends the steel needs to be thicker than required on unbent areas (99% of the metal).

There are new methods of forming going to be introduced to allow the steel to be formed without the thinning pressing it causes.
One idea is to create a sealed envelope and blow compressed air into it to form the steel into a mould. This doesn't cause stretching at sharper angles so thinner sheet can be used.

I wouldn't have put a Mercedes w124 in any catagory of efficiency or aerodynamics, it's pretty poor on both counts.
It's not the mass of the vehicle makes the engines inefficient, it's just the engines themselves and the method of running them in variable rev ranges.

As you correctly say the manufacturers have only invested as much as is neccessary to continue sales, not a penny more.

 

[hawk20]

As you correctly say the manufacturers have only invested as much as is neccessary to continue sales, not a penny more.

GM, Ford, Mercedes, Toyota and others have spent a fortune, and are going on spending further fortunes, on developing electic cars, hybrids, hydrogen and so on, none of which has anything to do with continuing present sales and all of which is about ensuring sales in the future. It is probably true that the big car companies have people at least as clever at seeing into the future of the motor car as does this forum.

 

[Splatt]

Some good ideas out there folks! I just wish our governments would make some of them happen instead of taking our taxes for "public transport".

I just read that the new Toyota Celica is to be a hybrid with 40miles range on the battery.
You can also plug it in overnight to re-charge it. I'm curious. My current Celica is a very good car, but this new capability could mean that I can go to work and back every day on electrical power, almost half of my annual miles! I like Toyota's approach, slow steps learning each time they release a new technology. The car is a 1.5l petrol with this new hybrid engin

Bye!
John

Does this mean that the Prius hybrid which does not have the ability to charge from the mains but uses on board batteries purely as a recovered energy store is not such a good idea if Toyota are not following up on it.

 

[johnmc]

Some good ideas out there folks! I just wish our governments would make some of them happen instead of taking our taxes for "public transport".

I just read that the new Toyota Celica is to be a hybrid with 40miles range on the battery.
You can also plug it in overnight to re-charge it. I'm curious. My current Celica is a very good car, but this new capability could mean that I can go to work and back every day on electrical power, almost half of my annual miles! I like Toyota's approach, slow steps learning each time they release a new technology. The car is a 1.5l petrol with this new hybrid engine.

Now, the real trick would be to charge the car in the time it takes to boil a kettle and get the range to about 250miles. The filling station could be reduced to a line of plug points with slots for a Visa Card!

Bye!
John

 

[johnmc]

Hi Splatt,
The next generation Prius will be using the same battery pack, and will have the ability to be charged overnight too. The Celica version is planned to be a proper sports car making full use of the high torque electric motors.

Toyota axed the Celica, MR2 and Supra to meet the emissions requirements around the world, and will only replace them with clean engine technology that keeps them within the new regulations.

I'm hoping that Merc are seeing the same potential, and can perhaps leap a generation of technology and get decent hybrids or other clean cars out soon. I also read that they are talking to BMW about re-using engines from the Mini in the next A-class (which is supposed to be a "normal hatchback" instead of the MPV shape. Beg, borrow and maybe make better?

John