People are dying early because they have to breath car fumes. This is expecially the case in urban environments. Everyone living in a bussy city knows that the moment you step outside your door you will be deafened by carnoise, and within a few seconds you smell the half burned fossil fuels, see the smoke. Stop and go traffic is belching out clouds of soot from half heated badly tuned engines. Supply trucks are the worst.
Some morons even pride themselves in the soot comming out of their stacks..
New research concludes it is 25% of the cars that cause 90% of the pollution. Ideally you’d have CO2, NOx and H2O (from cars running on pure fuels without added chemicals). NOx is unavoidable but can be removed with an ammonia Bleutech ‘afterburner’ as happens in some Mercedes cars. But there is always some VOC, meaning unburned fuels, and soot, also meaning unburned fuel as well.
In many countries mandatory car checks have been introduced to increase road safety. In Holland this is called the APK check. It means you your car brakes, lights and a number of other things have to work or it has to be kept off the roads. We think it would be a smart move to do the same for emissions. Since it is only a small portion of cars that are high pollutors, and probably and even smaller portion of that small group, that are the real culprits, it makes sense to introduce road side emission checks.
HC are hydrocarbons, or VOC, volatile organic compounds
The idea is not new, but it may be something one can put more emphasis and action to in the next few decades as the world is trying to rid itself of all internal combustion cars on the road in favour of battery electric vehicles. Recently the health issue has recieved more attention, also because higher average temperatures increase the damaging effect of some emissions, like ozone.
We don’t want people to drive cars that kill other people, no matter how slowly
Internal combustion cars are despreratly (for fucking crying out loud) inefficient. This situation is worsed by having to remove emissions, which costs energy as well. Electric cars using the same fuel to generate electricty and then use that electricity to drive their engines are already more efficient (so called hybrids if the generation happens inside the car). The top of the range is electric cars using solar/wind or other renewable electricity sources.