Green has become one of the most popular colors in the auto industry, and not just as an exterior hue.
At the recent Chicago and Detroit Auto Shows, car companies touted environmental advances with the same enthusiasm as performance and price breakthroughs.
Environmental safety is now a selling point like occupant safety. And Ford Motor Co. and American Honda Motor Co. are taking the lead.
Honda, for example, sells cleaner versions of its 1998 Accord and Civic in all 50 states, though these low-emission vehicles are required only in California, New York and Massachusetts. (Nine other northeastern states will adopt LEV standards for cars and light-duty trucks in the 1999 model year. LEVs won’t be required in Illinois and the remaining states until 2001.) Honda estimates it will sell 440,000 LEVs this model year.
Honda also was the first company to meet California’s even stricter ultralow emission vehicle standards with a version of the Accord EX that went on sale last fall–two years ahead of schedule.
Ford Motor Co. is jumping ahead of the federal schedule with its 1999 sport-utility vehicles–the Ford Explorer and Expedition, Lincoln Navigator and Mercury Mountaineer–and Windstar mini-van.
All of those vehicles will meet LEV standards for cars, though as trucks they are allowed higher emissions.
Ford expects to sell 860,000 of these SUVs and mini-vans in 1999, the first trucks sold nationally to meet the LEV standards.
“We are responding to a customer concern,” Kelly Brown, Ford’s director of vehicle environmental engineering, said of Ford’s jumping ahead of federal LEV requirements with its popular SUVs. “Just like if people want more doors, we add more doors.”
Most late-model passenger cars produce .25 grams per mile of hydrocarbons, or unburned gas, a main pollutant. Under LEV limits, cars can produce only .075 and light-duty trucks such as Explorer .1 gram per mile. Ford says the 1999 Explorer and Mountaineer will beat the standard for cars at .07 grams.
Ford reduced tailpipe emissions on its SUVs and mini-van with a combination of new software and hardware.
New software for the engine computer more precisely controls fuel flow and combustion, cleaning up the exhaust gas before it gets to the catalytic converter.
The vehicles have larger catalysts that use more precious metals–platinum, palladium and rhodium–and reach operating temperature faster to convert more pollutants into water or harmless gases before they escape out the tailpipe.
Brown said Ford applied this new technology to trucks first because most of their engines were new or overhauled in the last few years. The Expedition and Navigator, for example, use Ford’s new overhead-cam V-8 engines, which are cleaner than older overhead-valve engines.
Honda says it uses a more efficient engine management system and variable valve timing that allows a leaner fuel mixture to lower emissions on the Accord and Civic. The LEV models produce .075 grams of hydrocarbons, and the ULEV Accord produces just .04 grams.
When car companies began tackling pollution 30 years ago, they used add-on devices such as air pumps and exhaust-gas recirculation valves to try to clean up the exhaust.
On newer engines, pollution control is built in through more efficient combustion chambers, fuel injectors and other features, and today’s electronic controls tightly regulate the air-fuel mixture.
“When we were designing new truck engines, lower emissions were a key driver. The best way to lower emissions is to not create them,” Brown said.
“As the emissions kept coming down with the new engines, we started thinking that with a little more work, we can really get the emissions down. Four or five years ago we wouldn’t have imagined we could do this.”
Brown estimates the new hardware and software costs an average of $100 per vehicle. Ford says the cost will not be passed on to consumers as a price increase.
More vehicles will get the new emissions technology in coming years, Brown said. Ford and its suppliers don’t have the resources to revamp all 3.2 million vehicles the company sells annually in the U.S. at one time.
Neither General Motors Corp. nor Chrysler Corp. plan to follow Ford or Honda in offering LEVs nationally ahead of schedule.
Al Weverstad, GM’s director of vehicle emissions and fuel economy, said the company’s suppliers don’t have the capacity to gear up for LEV standards in all states before 2001.
“Two years may sound like a long time to a consumer, but it’s really a very short time in our business,” he said.
GM, more than any manufacturer, uses older overhead-valve engines, but Weverstad says that is not a stumbling block to meeting LEV levels.
“Our engines are fully capable of meeting the national standards for low-emission vehicles,” Weverstad said.
GM will introduce a new family of overhead-valve truck engines in the 1999 model year. Weverstad says the overhead-valve design was chosen for its simplicity and because truck buyers prefer its low-speed torque characteristics.
In the battle over clean air, automakers also have turned their attention to cleaner gasoline.
The American Automobile Manufacturers Association, a trade group that represents the three domestic companies, and a similar group that represents foreign companies urged the federal Environmental Protection Agency in March to limit the sulfur in gas, which can contaminate catalytic converters and reduce their effectiveness.
California has a sulfur limit of 80 parts per million, but there is no national standard. An AAMA study concluded that the national average is more than 300, and pump gas in the Chicago area has as much as 800 parts per million, among the highest in the country.
“A new car today is 97 to 98 percent cleaner than a 1970 car,” said Andrew Card, president of the AAMA. “If we have to make our cars even cleaner, they have to recognize that what comes out of a car is a result of what goes into it.”
The AAMA says that additional refining costs to reduce sulfur in gas would add 3 cents per gallon, while the EPA estimates 1 to 5 cents. The oil industry, which opposes the idea, predicts it would increase the price consumers pay 20 cents a gallon.
Weverstad agrees that cleaner gas is necessary if automakers are to make more significant reductions in emissions.
“You are what you eat,” he said. “The quality of fuel is important to what comes out the tailpipe.
“Right now, we’re talking about reducing fractions of fractions in emissions. When you get down to cutting the final fractions–such as one-half of 1 percent–it becomes very expensive, and there is very little change overall to the environment.”
HOW GREEN IS YOUR CAR?
Rating guides judge the safety, fuel economy, ownership costs, reliability and quality of automobiles, and now there is one that judges their environmental friendliness.
Published by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, the “Green Guide to Cars and Trucks” ranks every 1998 vehicle sold in the U.S. by a “green score.”
According to the council, a nonprofit research group, the green score is “based on a vehicle’s air-pollution health costs, global-warming pollution and other specifications.”
The 108-page guide is available for $8.95, plus $5 shipping and handling, from ACEEE Publications, 1001 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Suite 801, Washington, D.C., 20036. Highlights of the guide are found on ACEEE’s Web site aceee.org/greenguide.
