An occasional update on items from Motordom – the world of auto dominance
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TELECOMMUTING MYTH
It’s not that green:
A 2011 article in the Annals of Regional Science found that, on average, telecommuters end up putting in more travel—on both nonwork-and work-related trips—than those who don’t telecommute.
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PEAK CAR IN EUROPE
Some industry executives and analysts fear the EU car market may never regain
the nearly 16 million vehicles registered in 2007. Instead the market is more
likely to shrink toward the previous low of around 11 million cars in 1993
before it stabilizes at only modestly higher levels, amid the rush by households
and governments to reduce their debts. …Stuart Pearson, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, said a wide range of forces–from high fuel costs, increased online shopping and social interaction, to more congested roads in increasingly crowded European cities—are combining to make Europeans drive less than they used to.
“Our bottom-up analysis of ownership, demographic and vehicle-age trends suggests that a recovery in Europe could remain elusive for the rest of this decade,” Mr. Pearson said in a recent research note.
People in the industry agree.
“Europe resembles Japan in the early 90s,” said Hakan Samuelsson, the chief executive of Volvo Cars.
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DON’T BLAME BEIJING
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Or rather, just Beijing because it’s air quality this week happened to be “apocalyptic.” Turns out air pollution might be worse in cities in India.
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Air pollution in Beijing has been described as “apocalyptic” this week with people choking their way through murky streets, short of breath and their eyes stinging from toxic air. But Beijing is just one of hundreds of cities,largely in Asia, where poisonous air is now the fastest growing cause of death in urban populations. …
.But while Beijing got the headlines this week, there is mounting evidence that air pollution in India is as bad, if not worse, than in China. A study conducted by satellite imagery by Tel Aviv University last year reported that Indian megacities were seeing double digit increases in air pollution. ….The blame is variously levelled on the geography of cities, the inversion of temperatures especially in cold months which trap pollutants, the vastly increasing number of cars, power plants, forest fires and the boom in building construction. However, the Lancet study found that it was specifically the type of air pollution caused by car and truck exhaust that was doing the most health damage.
There is increasing evidence too that the air pollution now plaguing cities is because the fuel being burned by millions of cars and motorbikes is heavily contaminated by dealers who mix petrol and diesel with kerosene, waste industrial solvents and other additives to produce cheaper fuel. The result is a cocktail of poisonous emissions, many of which are not picked up by government monitoring stations and which are not filtered out by catalytic converters.
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