Yes, but the service life of a Land Cruiser 200 series is 25 years. There’s a profound amount of environmental impact beyond the gas pump, and most of it comes from building and shipping all the parts to assemble the automobile over and over again. The manufacturing process is profoundly environmentally destructive, so vehicles that have a longer service life (Land Cruiser is 2-2.5 times the average) have a role to play.
They are also one of the few petrol vehicles that are still built to this kind of standard, so they do demonstrate as the “smoking gun” that the industry itself engineers obsolescence into their vehicles and could do much better.
Somehow we’ve all been reduced to yakking on and on about fuel economy. There are 30,000 parts in the average car, and almost all of them are manufactured and shipped. What’s the impact of tens of thousands of components and built onsite for JIT manufacturing?
If we wanted to change this, we could do very easily. We would just need to put a sticker in the window of the car that says: “Designed to Last: 12 years” or whatever. That way people could make an informed decision and game theory would come in to effect. Auto makers know this information: every car has a design life of you wouldn’t have anything like the “25 year design life” of a Land Cruiser in the first place.
I consider it the impact of car and oil company propaganda, as they’ve narrowed the discussion to “miles per gallon” rather than the overall impact of design life and the constant need to remanufacture the same vehicle over and over again for the same customer throughout their lifetime.
The hidden danger is in the subtle propaganda of suggested talking points from industry that subtly moves the conversation over decades. Propaganda isn’t to tell us what to think, it’s to frame and influence the things we talk about and give us a industry favorable set of opinion talking points to frame a conversation that benefits the status quo.
The Land Cruiser is one of the last petrol vehicles that demonstrates without a doubt that we could be building to a much higher standard for viritually the same money. It was 84k when it went off the market in 2020, and Toyotas next most expensive vehicle with half the service life was about 75k. The Land Cruiser has a 10,000 usd tax because it isn’t assembled in North America, so double the service life vehicle can be delivered at the same price as the top end vehicle in a lineup. Its simply a choice by car companies not to do it.
But all we as a society can talk about is gas mileage, because that’s something the “industry can get behind.”
> There’s a profound amount of environmental impact beyond the gas pump, and most of it comes from building and shipping all the parts to assemble the automobile over and over again. The manufacturing process is profoundly environmentally destructive, so vehicles that have a longer service life (Land Cruiser is 2-2.5 times the average) have a role to play.
This isn't really true. The manufacturing is intensive but not nearly as intensive as setting fire to 1/4 gallon of gas every mile.
This impact is also significantly lower for gas cars than electric, which achieve parity around 15,000 driven miles.
There is an obvious inherent trade-off of a longer service life: you don't get efficiency improvements for 25 years.
[edit] Studies show an average gas car produces about 5.6t of CO2e in manufacture, an electric car about 8.8t of CO2e. For the gasoline car that's equivalent to burning ~600 gallons of gasoline and for the electric, ~1000 gallons.
An average car is driven 12500mi per year, and look if you're getting 10mpg, that's 6 months. How about the other 24 years 6 months? Buying a car that's 10% more efficient breaks even after what, a couple of years? [1]
If you care about the environment, take a train. Caltrain gets 100 passenger-miles per gallon average on their diesel engines and those train cars are older than I am. Once they move to electric, it should be 250-ish pax-mi/gal-equivalent based on Bart. Although I suspect probably a lot more due to the longer runs between stations.
Regarding trains, I don't think that's really accurate. Yes, a train that's completely full gets excellent effective mileage per passenger for that trip. But how often are they anywhere near full? In reality, trains and buses have to make a huge number of runs either completely or virtually empty in order to have a regular enough schedule for anybody to be willing to depend on them. We need to know the effective fuel consumption of all runs actually made per total actual passenger-miles transported over the course of at least a week, maybe more like a month.
And that's before we account for any additional trips needed for personnel movements, car and track servicing, and other such things.
Those numbers are from Bart and Caltrain's operating reports.
The Bart number may have been during peak only so fair point there, I can certainly look for the systemwide average. [1]
The Caltrain number is average over FY2016-2018, from their sustainability report page 5. [2] They completed roughly 436M passenger-miles per year, and consumed roughly 4.4M gallons of diesel. Clocks in around 100 passenger-miles per gallon. I'm sure its worse now with the COVID numbers. I think it's a fair ballpark point of comparison though, and you can consider the Bart number an upper limit.
You're of course right its a function of ridership. An average freight train gets over 400 miles per gallon per ton of cargo.
They are also one of the few petrol vehicles that are still built to this kind of standard, so they do demonstrate as the “smoking gun” that the industry itself engineers obsolescence into their vehicles and could do much better.
Somehow we’ve all been reduced to yakking on and on about fuel economy. There are 30,000 parts in the average car, and almost all of them are manufactured and shipped. What’s the impact of tens of thousands of components and built onsite for JIT manufacturing?
If we wanted to change this, we could do very easily. We would just need to put a sticker in the window of the car that says: “Designed to Last: 12 years” or whatever. That way people could make an informed decision and game theory would come in to effect. Auto makers know this information: every car has a design life of you wouldn’t have anything like the “25 year design life” of a Land Cruiser in the first place.
I consider it the impact of car and oil company propaganda, as they’ve narrowed the discussion to “miles per gallon” rather than the overall impact of design life and the constant need to remanufacture the same vehicle over and over again for the same customer throughout their lifetime.
The hidden danger is in the subtle propaganda of suggested talking points from industry that subtly moves the conversation over decades. Propaganda isn’t to tell us what to think, it’s to frame and influence the things we talk about and give us a industry favorable set of opinion talking points to frame a conversation that benefits the status quo.
The Land Cruiser is one of the last petrol vehicles that demonstrates without a doubt that we could be building to a much higher standard for viritually the same money. It was 84k when it went off the market in 2020, and Toyotas next most expensive vehicle with half the service life was about 75k. The Land Cruiser has a 10,000 usd tax because it isn’t assembled in North America, so double the service life vehicle can be delivered at the same price as the top end vehicle in a lineup. Its simply a choice by car companies not to do it.
But all we as a society can talk about is gas mileage, because that’s something the “industry can get behind.”
It’s something to bear in mind.