Mike Rutherford's column

Rutherford has his say about the latest anti-car drive.

Auto Express Car Reviews

By Mike Rutherford

09th December 2007

Here we go again! The car continues to get more than its fair share of flak for destroying the planet, and sending us all to hell in a handcart. Motorists have already been wrongly and disgracefully accused of creating most of the world’s accidents, noise pollution and global warming.


	Motorists are already public enemy No.1. And now, we’re told we will generate enough scrap by 2030 to fill Wembley Stadium 1,000 times

In the eyes of mischievous and misguided politicians and eco mentalists, we’re ‘public enemy number one’. And now, globally, drivers are being told that by 2030 we’ll be generating so much scrap that we’ll be able to fill London’s Wembley Stadium more than 1,000 times over.

This time it’s a university professor doing the scaremongering which, deliberately or otherwise, will give the self-drive personal mobility machine an even worse name than it already has. And before you ask, no, I’m not prepared to name the professor or the university in question because I can’t help feeling that such car-hostile reports are often little more than propaganda exercises designed to raise the profile of academics and learning institutions who crave the oxygen of free publicity.

I’m also concerned some of the seemingly respectable and independent people who write and publish a few of these ‘studies’, together with the universities they ‘work from’, may not be quite as independent as they should. As we all know, universities and professors can – and do – receive grants, research funding and other external funds in order to publish some of their so-called reports and research studies. Was this latest Car Industry Faces Urgent Recycling Challenge document ‘sponsored’ by an outside organisation or individuals with an axe to grind? That’s not known.

Officially, the report has been produced by DRIVENet, although it’s not entirely clear who or what that particular outfit is, or what its confusing name is supposed to mean.

Neither is it clear who will be responsible for the predicted 1,000-plus Wembley Stadiums full of rusting automotive junk. Almost inevitably, the car and the industry are the first words mentioned in the publicity blurb that accompanies this report. But on closer examination, it becomes apparent that the 3.6 billion tonnes of waste that will fill the said stadiums will be ‘vehicle scrap’. True: vehicles can be cars. Yet they can also be coaches, lorries and trucks, as well as countless other types of machine we see on our roads.

And what about trams and trains, agriculture and construction vehicles, aeroplanes and helicopters, ships and boats? They’re all ‘vehicles’, too. Unlike the car, many of these are near impossible to scrap, never mind recycle. So why all the emphasis on the humble automobile – a relatively tiny, energy-efficient, mass-produced tool that can be reduced to the size of a TV at the end of its life?

The publicity blurb for the same car-obsessed report says that the number of ‘vehicles’ on the world’s roads will increase by 65 per cent to 1.48 billion by 2030, with each ‘vehicle’ accounting for 1.85 tonnes of waste during its lifetime. Are these cars or vehicles in general? The latter, I suspect.

All the more reason why it’s grossly unfair to keep pointing the finger at the car, the automotive industry and vehicle users for environmental problems when, collectively, we’re only responsible for a comparatively tiny proportion of the problems on the planet. It’s a cop-out, to say the very least.