Andrew English's column

	Perhaps we should ignore car disposal schemes, hold on to our old bangers and just not drive them much!

Welcome, comrade Fidel Castro, to the ranks of regular columnists. We scribblers at Auto Express salute you, el presidente. In February, the drab-green Cuban president aimed his Cohiba cigar firmly in the direction of the retirement home, but not without a sign-off promise to continue his dialogue with his fellow revolutionaries through his column “Reflections Of Fidel” in the state-run daily newspaper, Granma.

But perhaps there are some things we can learn from the man who the CIA has attempted to kill with a poisoned wet suit and an exploding cigar. Everyone who has ever been to Cuba returns with stories of the fabulous old cars, battered and beaten, but still plying their trades as cabs on the streets of Havana. For 46 years, American trade sanctions against the island have ensured that new vehicles are virtually unobtainable. That has meant that the old Dodges, Chryslers, Fords and Chevys from the pre-Castro days have been modified and mended to keep them going.

This is not quite the nightmare you might first imagine it to be. While these old hulks are not as safe as a modern supermini, they don’t go very fast and Cuba maintains Draconian penalties for traffic offences. Nor is it an environmental disaster, either. In a lot of cases they run on locally brewed ethanol biofuel, and the embedded CO2 that was expended in their production is long since paid for.

It’s a bit like us British, who keep our cars longer than any other Western European state. This isn’t such a bad thing, as figures from Volvo show the CO2 expended in a vehicle’s production is about 13 per cent of its lifetime emissions, and is a lot higher for older models. One estimate is that the construction of Seventies vehicles accounted for up to 45 per cent of total energy use – and that’s not counting the CO2 released in scrapping them. Keeping your old car can be an environmental act, but only if you don’t use it too much.

Not that the motor industry seems to think so. I have seen calls for the reinstatement of disposal schemes that were in vogue in the mid-Nineties. The idea is that the Government gives you a grant (in France it was about £1,500) to take your car to a scrapyard and buy a brand new, more eco-friendly model. Proponents say that it gets a vast number of older, more polluting cars off the road at once, replacing them with modern, safer and greener models.

These initiatives were tried in France, Ireland, Italy and Spain, as well as some US states. At first, car makers could scarcely believe their luck and the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) and Retail Motor Industry Federation (RMIF) called for a similar system to be introduced in Britain. The results, however, were very mixed. In France, where Renault had hoped to make a killing on its then-new Twingo, the public bought the much cheaper Fiat Cinquecento instead, so the system acted as a French government subsidy to Italy. In Ireland, there were all manner of accusations of skulduggery.

Within a few years, the SMMT and the RMIF had changed their tune, and a World Energy Council report was extremely cautious, saying that there was little evidence of cost benefits, and that it grossly distorted car markets. So, perhaps Fidel has got things right through getting things wrong? Those old Fords and Chevys might have done us all a power of good. Maybe we should ignore car scrapping and hold on to our old bangers, and not drive them much.

Besides, by the time our present Government gets round to implementing such a scheme, most of the older vehicles it would be targeting will have worn out anyway.