Car Science: pretending to make changes
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Hey,
Firstly: sorry that it's been a really, really long time since I last sent one of these out. I've been trying to take the time to have a serious think about how to make it something worthwhile for me writing it and you reading it that's sustainable and y'know, good content with a purpose.
There's like three paragraphs about what's going on with it now, here or you can just scroll down and get to the bit where I start bitching about fuel inducement systems.
When I first started doing Car Science 1) I wasn't expecting anyone to subscribe, 2) I hadn't really thought through how to make it a compelling offering cus I figured I'd do it once and then just die of embarrassment and never mention it again. Amazingly, literally hundreds of you have actually subscribed which I'm incredibly grateful for - and if you like it, it's free and gives me a hand; the more subscribers I can say I've got, the more I can convince people to work with me on this.
It pretty quickly turned out that spending two days on a newsletter a week really wasn't sustainable (shocking) and so format tweaks got attempted, only to never quite work out. Which is why I spent a few weeks thinking about it. That and I had a major depressive episode but let's put some PR spin on this: the new Car Science format will be a news-related dive into something on Wednesdays and then some cool, more abstract research on Fridays - sometimes the link to cars might be more obvious, sometimes less. This week's Friday edition is about highway concrete getting chatty.
In the near future there'll be Car Science in new formats, like a podcast. And if I can get past the horror of editing video with myself in, a thing about composites that involves me nearly setting fire to a table. I've never tried to make the main newsletter kid-friendly because by the time you're talking about perovskites you might as well assume your audience can handle a bit of swearing but the YouTube stuff will be more family-friendly.
Does that sound believable? Well, like the petrochemical industry I rarely actually change my ways but can manage to cover for them with a lot of spin. Which brings me to this week's topic.
In a way, this is an all-time classic Car Science topic because it gets straight back into sustainable fuels and air pollution. Would it be exciting if more of the science relevant to news about cars was to do with supercapacitors or something? Yes but here we are.
So: the EU plans to ban the sale of combustion vehicles from anyone but the most boutique manufacturers by 2035. Actually, combustion isn't quite right there: CO2-producing vehicles. That means that a hydrogen combustion car would be alright and that a methanol reformer electric vehicle wouldn't be. Which is completely sensible if your goal is, specifically, to reduce and then end CO2 emissions from vehicles.
The 2035 date is because cars have about a 15 year lifespan (unless they're heroic 1993 Renault Twingos) and so that should mean the most recently-purchased cars producing CO2 were out of commission roughly on time for the 2050 zero carbon target.
Now, this only applies to new cars - it's not aiming to take cars off the roads prematurely or even putting additional restrictions on existing cars, it's talking about cars bought 12 years from now, new. So there's no need to bring in concerns about people dependent on older cars over this, this whole law is only about the sale of brand new petrol and diesel engine cars. And I guess methanol reformer vehicles if my personal nightmare of them ever becoming a thing comes true.
So from 2035 onwards the proposal was that you wouldn't be able to, in the EU, buy a brand new car that emitted CO2. This seems pretty reasonable, especially in the staggering climate crisis that we're in and the fact that scientists have been very clear current plans are not enough, so banning sales of CO2-emitting vehicles in 12 years time seems like a non-debatable thing. It should probably be much closer than that, if not in the past.
It's surprising, then, that a suggestion by Germany has managed to get this even more wriggle room. The European Commission got asked to draft a plan that included a provision for selling CO2-emitting vehicles, on the provision that they used so-called 'carbon neutral e-fuels.'
E-fuels really winds me up as a phrase because firstly it looks like what I assume the Daily Telegraph has in the style guide for talking about ESL tournaments but also because it sounds wildly different from what it is, which is synthetically refined petrol. Calling it 'the most advanced fuel in the world' and other marketing slogans is rubbish; it uses a very complicated process to avoid being derived from fossil fuel but it is, at the end of all that, just (expensive) petrol.
The synthetic fuel marketing machine has really ramped up in the last two years. It's scrambled into motorsport - one of petrochemical companies' longstanding ad hoardings - with particularly Formula 1 touting 100% carbon neutral fuels by 2026. In fact the phrase 'carbon neutral' comes up a lot, even though it's both not true and not exactly great in the first place. Neutrality, as with almost everything in 2023, is not enough.
Worse, though, the amendment doesn't make any sense anyway. Even assuming anyone wanted to buy a CO2-emitting car in 2035 (which seems genuinely fairly unlikely) then the condition for e-fuel - god, no, I can't do it - synthetic petrol combustion engines is that they have to be only able to run on fuel where the carbon has been previously captured by the air.
This presents a problem because combustion engines don't give a damn where the hydrocarbon chains they're breaking apart thermally come from. That's really not how combustion chambers work. Even if you reworked the fuel concept to develop something new - the equivalent of diesel vs petrol or whatever, so it would not run in the wrong vehicle - then it's hard to work out how the provenance of the carbon used in creating it could possibly ever be known. All you'd have validated was the specific fuel mix.
The proposal has a handwaved mention of a fuel inducement system that would somehow enforce this, although does mention that manufacturers aren't thrilled at the idea of having to develop new combustion technology for it. A lot of car makers already have or are in the process of stopping developing combustion engines (Mercedes in 2019, Audi in 2020, Stellantis in 2021 and BMW will in 2024) so it wouldn't be trivial to go and work out a new one in a decade's time. Especially since most car makers aren't planning to make combustion vehicles after 2030 - Audi stop in 2026, making their coming F1 car their only combustion vehicle by the time they enter.
If you google "fuel inducement system" as a full phrase there are six hits, five of which are reporting about the EC draft. That's because it's not a concept that currently exists.
Inducement systems do; what that means is something that, via the electronics of the vehicle, throttles the engine if it doesn't meet certain conditions. They're widespread in diesel vehicles, especially to force them to run with urea as an additive, preventing or reducing NOx emissions.
That's not been straightforward, however. In theory, the inducement system should shut things down if the Selected Catalytic Reduction (SCR) system isn't running, things shut down. But it turned out the inducement system couldn't tell the difference between genuine diesel exhaust fluid, which would reduce emissions and water being in the tank that should hold that.
If a system can't tell whether something's water or urea then there's very little chance it will be able to read whatever QR-coded promise that carbon had been captured from the air using clean energy might be attached to the stuff in a fuel pump.
Who is this really for? You would have to assume, specifically, Porsche. The VW Group's history with scamming emissions is fairly well documented and this ought to draw widespread cynicism as a move to make a strange loophole in a future that shouldn't need one. But Porsche has invested in synthetic fuels and promised it will continue to develop combustion cars, even as it turns to electrify parts of its range. (like the EV Macan, above)
So now we have a tabled draft of a proposal to continue running fuels that aren't carbon-neutral (the energy and processes that go into making them mean they can't be, even if the carbon they're molecularly constructed out of comes from the air) in engines no one's developed and might well be impossible to have any way not to game. In 12 years time, when no one might care about any of this anyway.
Carbon-neutral e-fuels are great marketing at the minute, though. And in the same way everyone needs to push back on bullshit battery projects and lithium speculation, there needs to be a healthy amount of cynicism about them in the public consciousness before the marketing spiel gets set into law.
Hazel
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Images:
Porsche Macan electric in the grounds of the Porsche factory in Leipzig (via Porsche)