The green future of the car industry

Résumé du document

Cars and, through them, all the automotive industries, from the conception to the end of the vehicles is one of the most polluting industries. Nowadays nobody can ignore that the effect of the pollution on the earth is the major problem that humanity has to deal with. We should react, and most of the citizens of the developed countries understood it. To face this growing demand in "green cars", and also to take advantage of it, the automobile constructors need to change their entire organization. But people becoming aware of the situation is not the only reason that incite the constructors to change in an environmental-friendly way. The high rate of the raw materials and the need to find others sources of energy are also triggers of a change. In the following pages, I will first show you the current situation of the cars and also the beginning of a green car industry; then I will find the solutions that constructors are going to use, and try to forecast what the automotive industry will look like in the future.

Extraits

[...] The constructors have already understood this trend, and they also know that it is the only way to develop their industry on long term. This green change will give to the automotive industry a new corporate image, will permit cost savings and at the same time will respect the earth. [...]

[...] In fact, as soon as a car is driven at a speed of over 80 Kph, most of the energy that its engine delivers is devoted to over-coming air resistance. This force is directly linked to the vehicle drag coefficient. The better the car penetrates the air, the lower its fuel consumption. Environmental factors should be integrated into design projects for vehicles and powertrain components. At each phase in the design process, designers and suppliers seek to reduce the vehicle's ecological impact throughout its future life cycle. A range of eco-design tools have been developed to help them in their day-to-day work. [...]

[...] First the rate of the oil, these last years has never stopped to climb. Thus it has led to a situation where it is necessary seek others solutions. These researching processes permitted to find out some new types of oil such has the Liquefied petroleum gas which is a mixture of hydrocarbon gases used as a fuel. It is very clean burning and has lower greenhouse gas emissions than any other fossil fuel when measured on a total fuel cycle. [...]

[...] Using composites as a body material can greatly reduce the complexity of a vehicle by markedly decreasing part count. A conventional car body is constructed of between 250 and 300 separate stamped steel parts. By contrast, plastic and carbon fibre can be formed into more complex shapes than steel, new cars would have only between 10 and 20 major components. Finally, competences in nanotechnology are among the core competences in future automobile construction, and they are vital for maintaining competitiveness. [...]

[...] Unlike metals, however, plastics are much more difficult to recycle. An old car represents one tonne of scrap. Between 8 million and 9 million cars are discarded each year in the European Union, creating around 2 million tonnes of non-metallic waste which ends up in landfills. And why plastics are not recycled? Only because treating the remaining waste left by old cars after the separation of the metal parts for recycling is not economical; it is cheaper to dump it as landfill! [...]