Eco-Friendly Cars

 If you are looking to buy a car. How do you pick the car that is good for you and for the planet? There is already a lot to inspect when choosing a new car, and factor like climate change makes it even trickier. Well, we are here to guide you through it. Cars don’t just produce emissions when you are driving them. Assembling a car any kind of car takes a tremendous amount of energy, and so does disposing of it. So, when we talk about the climatic impact of a car, we have to consider the industry to landfill, not just on the road. So, that applies to all kinds of cars. But there’s still a lot to consider. First of all, we have got our good internal combustion engine cars. They can be powered by ethanol, propane even biodiesel, but mostly run-on gasoline and regular diesel. These kinds of vehicles account for nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions. But you have still got some choices that can reduce the impact of even a gas-burning car. Fuel efficiency how far you can go on one liter or gallon of gas depends a lot on vehicle type, age and model. Older cars can be less fuel-efficient, but buying a used car technically produces fewer emissions than a new car, because no extra energy went into producing the used car. Luckily there are a few easy means you can use to compare cars' fuel efficiency. And when it comes to which fuel is good to use, carbon dioxide emissions from diesel cars are likely to be lower but diesel cars emit more other kinds of gases, that may not affect the climate, but make the air less healthy to breathe. Considering all this, many climates conscious car buyers are turning to electric vehicles. Electric car run-on electricity stored in a battery. That simple! An electric vehicle doesn’t burn any kind of fuel and they don’t even have a tailpipe so they don’t emit any emissions when they are on the road. Remember, making a car and all of its parts takes energy, and this can produce its own emissions. So how clean are electric vehicles? Today’s electric cars typically run on lithium-ion batteries, which contain elements that are really rare and difficult to find like cobalt. But the process of mining and processing these metals into usable battery components requires a huge amount of energy. Even the wiring, casing, and the stuff that holds the battery together are expensive. All this considered, manufacturing an electric car produces about 65% more greenhouse gas emissions than manufacturing a regular car. When an Electric vehicle is plugged in, it’s gaining electricity from the power grid. Depending on where you live, how electricity could be generated by coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or in most places, a mix of all of these. So, driving an electric vehicle will probably still produce greenhouse gas emissions, just not from the tailpipe. When you consider manufacturing and charging, there’s no truly zero-emissions car in the market yet. But the thing is even though assembling an electric car produces more emissions than making a gas-powered car, and even though many electric cars get their energy at least partially from non-renewable sources over their whole lifetime most electric cars still generate less than half of the emissions of gas-powered vehicles. Electricity generating plants are simply more efficient at turning combustible fuel into energy than a car engine is at turning gasoline into energy.

So, are hybrid cars in the middle ground? Well, non-plug-in hybrids with gas engines and batteries charged when the car is moving are just fuel-efficient regular cars with a more emissions-heavy production process. The impact of plug-in hybrid cars on small gas engines and batteries charged by plugging in is hugely dependent on the energy source charging them. Manufacturing emissions are higher for hybrids cars too, but in many cases, the on-the-road emissions savings is more than enough to make up for that. The biggest factor in whether a plug-in hybrid contributes more or fewer emissions than a regular car is the source of the electricity going into its battery, similar to those questions surrounding electric cars. There is a couple of other choices out there too, like hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, which use hydrogen gas to power an electric motor! The technology is tricky, the infrastructure just isn’t there yet and as of right now they are super expensive. It's too early to suppose how they may pile up compared to gas and electric vehicles in a practical way. The answer to this question “which car?” could be no car at all. If you live in an area that’s highly walkable or rideable or that has convenient public transportation, it may not make sense to drive daily. But the harsh truth is we have built a world that depends on automobiles, so we need to drive toward a greener car future. Just think if everyone in the World drove electric vehicles, we could cut our total car-produced gas emissions by half, even without changing how we make our electricity! We are in a huge time of transition when it comes to how we get around in a climate-friendly way.