It’s a well-known fact that diesel cars are more harmful to the environment than standard petrol cars but few people realise just how toxic they are. New data from the International Council on Clean Transportation shows that diesel cars can produce as much as 10 times the amount of toxic gas when compared to buses or trucks.
The emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from diesel vehicles particularly troubling since NOx pollution is the cause of many early deaths in the UK every year. Given this fact, it might be surprising that diesel cars are even allowed on UK roads but the reason they are is due to the different testing that’s applied to cars compared to large vehicles.
The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) are one of the groups mainly responsible for revealing Volkswagen’s cheating in the recent ‘dieselgate’ scandal. The trouble with the current testing standards for diesel cars is that they’re only required to be tested in laboratory conditions and not randomly under real world driving conditions, as large vehicles such as buses and trucks are.
Campaigners are putting pressure on the government to change this so that diesel cars are held to the same strict standards as large vehicles.
In other news related to the environment, a new survey of auto bosses has shown that battery-powered cars are likely to dominate the marketplace by 2025. Even more surprising than this is that the car manufacturing bosses believe that half of today’s car owners will not want to own a car and would instead prefer self-driving cars.
Electric and self-driving vehicles have been in the news a lot over the last few years and many people still believe the latter to be something that won’t be seen until the distant future. However the technology behind self-driving cars has already been tested and shown to be viable.
As far as electric cars are concerned – their popularity continues to rise with each passing year, as more and more consumers realise their unique benefits, such as lower fuel costs and a smoother driving experience.
