Cars: the evolving environment debate

I recently spent some time with Cox Automotive, one of those companies that is absolutely critical to an industry but that few outside the industry will know. Through its various brands, Cox moves cars around, stores them, services them, markets them, resells them, repairs them, funds them. It creates the liquidity in the car market, keeping cars flowing from manufacturer, to fleet, to individual owner.

Cox asked me to give an extended keynote and Q+A session on the future of the automotive industry to a gathering of its leaders. I won’t share the full content of that presentation - that’s what they paid for - but I did think it would be interesting to pull out one idea in particular, around the nature of the environmental debate for cars.

Beyond carbon

Cars pollute. Just like anything we make pollutes in some way. But the way we assess that pollution, and the different components of it that we most care about, changes over time. With climate change high on the agenda, the most important pollutant to care about was naturally, for a long time, carbon.

Cars emit carbon in their production. And they emit carbon in use. I won’t rehash the maths around combustion engines vs electric cars. That has been done repeatedly better than I care to here. Check  out Simon Evans’s excellent article for Carbon Brief debunking many of the EV myths for one great example. The short version is that electric cars are drastically less polluting from a carbon perspective than their ICE (internal combustion engine) counterparts.

With the transition to electric vehicles well underway, and not slowing down - in spite of what many commentators would like you to believe - the debate about carbon has rather quieted. Not gone away. We haven’t solved climate change with this one action. But the ~13% of the UK’s carbon emissions that came from cars in 2021 will be much, much lower in just a few years.

Particulate Concerns

Overlapping the issue of carbon emissions was a deep concern about particulate emissions. Particularly those in the PM2.5 range - particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less, a size that causes serious health issues for humans. As the carbon conversation got quieter, the particulates issue became more of a focus.

Diesels were hit by a combination of emissions regulations, not just for carbon but for other greenhouse gases like NOx (nitric oxide), and particulates. The cars became more complicated and expensive to maintain, with lots of failures caused by blocked particulate filters.

Clean air zones like London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) and Manchester’s proposed scheme became the big focus. As they should: air pollution is estimated to be responsible for around 30,000 deaths a year in the UK and cost the NHS tens of millions every year - possibly hundreds of millions or even billions. It’s rather hard to estimate as we can’t attribute every health issue perfectly to a cause.

The good news is that PM2.5 emissions have fallen precipitously, at least at a European level. In 2005 the EU set a goal of reducing levels by 55% by 2030. By 2022 levels had already been cut 45%, and in 2024 the EU set out a new, even more stringent target for reduction. The UK plans to hit the same target level by 2040.

Contrary to what some anti-EV commentators will claim, the move to electric cars will not make this goal harder to reach. Because of regenerative braking (braking using the electric motors and turning momentum back into stored energy), EVs produce much less particulate emissions from their brakes.

Next? Noise

While there is still a lot of work to do on both particulate emissions and carbon, I can see the debate moving on again. And I strongly suspect a lot of the noise now will be about…noise.

EVs are quiet. One of the most shocking things to me when I went to Shanghai last year was just how quiet it was, with a very high proportion of all the vehicles on the road - cars, bikes, scooters - all being electrically powered. What this does is brings the noise made by ICE vehicles into much sharper relief. Noise we have long ignored suddenly becomes something we recognise as unnecessary.

Governments are incentivised to reduce noise. In 2018 the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) showed that in England alone, 100,000 DALYs - disability adjusted life years - are lost each year due to road traffic noise. And we already regulate for this. The legal limit for exhaust noise on new cars is 72 decibels (dB) falling to 68 dB in 2026.

The decibel scale is logarithmic, not linear, meaning a 10dB change is a perceived doubling in loudness. So a 4 dB cut is quite significant. But it’s probably not enough. The World Health Organisation recommends a safe threshold for environmental noise of 53dB.

By comparison, the ‘pop and bang’ maps so beloved of the modern boy racer might produce over 105 dB. Now we know this isn’t just annoying, it’s bad for our health.

Space: The final frontier

I strongly suspect we will see more crackdowns on noisy cars in the coming years, with perhaps another revision on the new car regulations and tighter enforcement of noise from cars on the road. Yes, you can have a ‘speed’ camera for noise. But the conversation doesn’t stop there. I think the next big conversation will be about space.

Cars take up a lot of room. They spend most of their time doing nothing. And in cities, they are mostly parked on the street.

Streets are shared resources. When everyone has, or at least wants, a car, then everyone accepts that we use our shared resource to store our cars. Even if - as people who follow me on social media will know - the parking of those cars can be a source of constant frustration.

What happens when fewer and fewer people own cars, or want to own cars? When they choose the alternatives of walking, safer cycle ways and improved public transport? When autonomous taxi services ultimately, self-driving subscription services, make owning a car less and less necessary?

Now you have more tension - an amplification of the tension we already see. Just listen to the righteous tutting of parents on foot about those driving their kids to school unnecessarily. Follow your neighbourhood Facebook and WhatsApp groups for complaints about on-pavement parking. Watch the videos of cyclists having to weave around cars parked all over cycle lanes.

After noise, I believe space will be the next big environmental debate. And I can see it having some consequences for the car industry. With 80% of the European population expected to live in cities by 2050, and car ownership in the largest cities already on the decline, this conversation is coming fast.

If taking up space on the road becomes less popular, will people still want the biggest cars? Giant 4x4s? Estates and MPVs might have the same footprint, but they are much less ostentatious about the space they consume. People might start to want cars that hide their size rather than proclaim it.

Smaller cars might become more attractive. Not just the new cohort of electric superminis we’re already seeing, like the Renault 5. But genuinely small city cars with the capability to get you out into the countryside if needed.

And if perceived space is as important as the actual footprint, might little roadsters be an appealing option? We can but dream…