Get a Rad Era Daily and Save The Planet

So I'm not really serious about this (yes he is but he wants to be able to say it was a goof if it goes south) but I will contend getting Rad Era car as a daily is good for the planet.

First as mentioned in that other  thread; manufacturing causes a significant amount of pollution so keeping that Rad Era car in circulation diminishes those effects.

Next new cars are heavy; bloated even. Those Rad Era cars are lighter and easier on roads therefore we'll have less road construction which also contributes to pollution.

Further there are some knock on effects; if yourp were driving around in a nice CRX Si that gold digger ex who married you when they saw you driving that Escalade would never have hooked up with you. Now your making two extra cross town trips every week to pick up your kids.

Also had you been driving that CRX you might have met someone down to earth who digs Rad Era cars and you'd be spending the night snuggling up reading GRM which lets you turn down the thermostat saving even more energy.

So there you have it; get a MR2, Golf GTI or CRX and save the planet...........

I actually concur. I had a '73 beetle that got 40mpg because a friend and I maintained it daily. I had a single wiper '82 Scirocco that I would love to have back and it probably did 30mph anyway.

Reminder that MPG != Emissions.

It's been done before, but I kind of want a K-swapped Honda Insight.  Not Rad era, but great MPG and performance.

It would be fun to swap an N20 into an E21.  

Interesting theory!

I'm doing my part! Just over 2K lbs and if I keep off the high cam, it's pretty good on fuel too. 

My summer daily:

As someone who daily's 90s cars they're really not generally better when you're not considering the improvement in catalysts and certain classes of vehicles like trucks/SUVs. City MPG tends to be a decent amount better nowadays too, so the break-even point on when a new car's environmental impact is less than an old car really depends on where you typically drive, what car you're actually replacing, and what car you're actually replacing it with. That said, keeping it well maintained and the emissions equipment intact on your daily driver are probably enough that you shouldn't sweat any impact driving your rad era car has on the environment.

Also this discussion is mostly moot without any reliable data.

In reply to bumpsteer :

You can reasonably use the standard it was built to get an ideas of the emissions. 
 

Personally, my cut off is about '96 and OBDII. Prior to that, the standards were less and the reaction to failures was poor. Much worse when you get to the 80's prior to OBDI. 
 

But it's also important that the manufacturing emissions have gone down, too. Both for direct health and CO2. 
 

One thing that can be said- a persons can get a Rad car, and diy a really clean vehicle. It's not to hard for some basic targets that will be better than the early 90's. 

In reply to alfadriver :

Careful you're getting precariously close to sound logic.....we'll have none of that here.

doing my part; been enjoying the 36mpg mixed that comes with driving a 106hp civic with no power options. 

In reply to Tom1200 :

Lol. I'll not put data together to support my theory, then.   I did find some data that the average car takes 350-450 gallons of gas of equivalent energy to build. The emissions work would need some research to fully back up. 

I was thinking about a similar concept recently though slightly differently. The original question was "at what point have you spent more in gas on a car than the original purchase price?" And the reason was my f150 just turned 225k miles old, and I figured 225k divided by 15 mpg means 15,000 gallons and at a rought guess average of $3.25 each that's $49k in gas. So it's getting pretty close to its original purchase price. 

At some point, a car's environmental impact becomes very directly tied to how many gallons of gas go through it, and all costs roughly mirror that idea.

Some cars will get to this "gas costs eclipse all other costs" point sooner than others, of course.

In reply to alfadriver :

I've often wondered what would happen if you bolted modern engine management components to a Rad Era car.

What about rad era cars with newer engines? Newer engine is 'better', so better engine in lighter car means it's even betterer at being a rad car, right?

In reply to DjGreggieP :

It has merit but you lose the agricultural engine note of many Rad Era motors.

In reply to Tom1200 :

If done reasonably well, a rad era car should be nearly as good as a mid90's car. The one thing that is tricky is the start and warm up, but once there, using a WB should give one good results with a more modern catalyst. 

In reply to DjGreggieP :

Carry over all of the hardware....  otherwise it's pretty equal engine out to engine out. 

Tom1200 said:

In reply to DjGreggieP :

It has merit but you lose the agricultural engine note of many Rad Era motors.

Well, I would not call the Alfa v6 of the rad era agricultural. 

In reply to alfadriver :

I'm strongly considerimg a Kswap in my e36 coupe (the small block is terrible from a maintenance perspective) and have been watching for cheap donors. Aside from drivetrain parts, I'd try to keep as many pieces as possible during the swap.

alfadriver said:

Tom1200 said:

In reply to DjGreggieP :

It has merit but you lose the agricultural engine note of many Rad Era motors.

Well, I would not call the Alfa v6 of the rad era agricultural. 

Nor would I but do note I said "many" and not all.

An Alfa V6 would sound even better if it were in my little Datsun.

Doing my part...

Not really, though....  I still have my '17 Ram dually, so I haven't really done anything other than having an extra car, though the BMW is what I use for most 'daily' duties.

I am pretty sure that at least one of my rad era cars has me on the EPA's 10 Most Wanted list.  Fortunately for the planet, I don't really drive it anymore.

Tom1200 said:

In reply to alfadriver :

I've often wondered what would happen if you bolted modern engine management components to a Rad Era car.

Not much, I don't think.  The modern gains are not so much in the external management, but inherent to the hardware.  Ski-jump intake ports (I know they have a better name) and very high tumble chambers.  More thermally efficient design in general.  Low friction, high efficiency transmissions with lots more gears.

Granted, a lot of this is possible because of the powertrain management, like torque limiting on shifts means the transmissions do not need to have as many frictions etc, and it takes a lot of computing power to deal with a drive by wire, direct injected, variable cam timing engine, but they go hand in hand, not inherent to a single thing you can swap elsewhere.

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

If you have to chase engine out emissions, yea, modern hardware matters. But modern catalysts with good feedback can do wonders. And most 90's cars had constant breakthrough of the cats. 

In reply to alfadriver :

I was thinking more of fuel economy than emissions, but now I am curious about what you mean by breakthrough of the converters.

I love learning about the tech, but ultimately I am not engineering them, I just pick up the pieces when things go wrong, so I know I have much to learn.