Modernised Retros
Discussion
Are they actually the real green vehicles? We're told time and time again that old stuff is horribly dirty and we should all buy a Prius but we also know that a pretty big % of the total CO2 cost of a vehicle happens during manufacture. There is a growing trend to modernise a "retro" vehicle which I'm pondering actually makes it far, far greener than recent Hybrids etc. and in terms of total energy useage and the like far better.
A friend of mine has an E30 BMW which he uses every day. It has WIFI, Bluetooth, Satnav, parking sensors, traction control and various other bits and bobs one would expect in a modern car. It also happens to be powered by an E46 330i engine complete with the original BMW ECU, cats etc. this along with a few other lighter bits means it tips the scales at a bit under 1200KGs with fuel. Over its life it's covered 280,000 miles and having been very well rebuilt a few years ago there isn't much reason it won't do the same again. It returns 35MPG without much effort and is driven about 20K miles a year.
A chap who lives up the road is also well along the road of building a Corrado with the 1.4 Twin Charged motor from a Golf in it. Again it'll have a lot of modern kit in there but wrapped up in a 23 year old shell. Like the BMW it'll be quicker than it was originally, have better fuel economy and lower emissions.
These cars have essentially a fixed energy/carbon cost and every year longer they last their per year cost drops accordingly. The bits used to build them were salvaged from crashed cars so for all intense and purpose have been made from recycled bits.
I'm genuinely interested if anyone can find figures on the "cost" of each vehicle as whilst I don't neccesarily subscribe to the CO2 brigade it'd be nice to be able to rebuff the old cars are poluting argument with some hard fact
A friend of mine has an E30 BMW which he uses every day. It has WIFI, Bluetooth, Satnav, parking sensors, traction control and various other bits and bobs one would expect in a modern car. It also happens to be powered by an E46 330i engine complete with the original BMW ECU, cats etc. this along with a few other lighter bits means it tips the scales at a bit under 1200KGs with fuel. Over its life it's covered 280,000 miles and having been very well rebuilt a few years ago there isn't much reason it won't do the same again. It returns 35MPG without much effort and is driven about 20K miles a year.
A chap who lives up the road is also well along the road of building a Corrado with the 1.4 Twin Charged motor from a Golf in it. Again it'll have a lot of modern kit in there but wrapped up in a 23 year old shell. Like the BMW it'll be quicker than it was originally, have better fuel economy and lower emissions.
These cars have essentially a fixed energy/carbon cost and every year longer they last their per year cost drops accordingly. The bits used to build them were salvaged from crashed cars so for all intense and purpose have been made from recycled bits.
I'm genuinely interested if anyone can find figures on the "cost" of each vehicle as whilst I don't neccesarily subscribe to the CO2 brigade it'd be nice to be able to rebuff the old cars are poluting argument with some hard fact
Land Rover ran a scheme in the 90s where anyone with a 2.5N/A or old TD engine in their Ninety/One Ten could bring it back to be factory retrofitted to Defender spec with a then-new TDi engine. Takeup was predictably quite high, and it makes me wonder why no-one else has ever offered such a thing. I mean, it's only the engines that pollute in a car. the windscreen doesnt pollute, nor do the carpets, or the bootlid, or the wheels. So it does annoy me when perfectly good cars get thrown away.
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