The Crittenden Automotive Library

ECO - The Mitigation Of Motoring

Topics: Ford Motor Company

ECO - The Mitigation Of Motoring

Geoff Maxted
DriveWrite
November 11, 2013

There are two types of person in the world. Those that love cars and those that know how to assemble a yurt. Sadly there are many people who hate cars (as opposed to people who love to own cars and hate them, like Alfa Romeo drivers) and it is these people who, right now, are shouting the loudest.

One day car lovers will come down for breakfast and smell the remains of the funeral pyre that was once their car; possibly with the remnants of a forlorn string-backed driving glove smouldering on the edges. Either that or we will be so regulated that the car will become but a shuttle to move us about in a regimented fashion in the brave new eco-world.

The car is much maligned. It is not, as the nay-sayers would have you believe, the tool of the devil. It is a remarkable invention that has provided delight and thrills for well over a century. Certainly it has it’s place in the list of polluters. The car industry is well aware of this and has taken huge steps in providing ever cleaner versions of their products.

As someone who reviews cars I have to admit, with a faint glow of embarrassment, that it has simply never occurred to me that driving a car simply to find out what it was like is an example of putting extra strain on the environment. Fortunately, the manufacturers have spotted this one and, in preparing cars for journalists, they put a lot of effort in to mitigate this malign motoring.

This is certainly the case at Ford. The company prepares some 1000 test cars annually for driving hacks to moon over. At the time of writing this I’m driving a Ford C-Max with a one litre EcoBoost engine, the review of which can be found elsewhere. The following steps have been taken to make the outcome as green as possible:

Ford also go so far as to process all waste fluids and components from the above procedure via their own recycling and recovery operation, Environ Automotive. So that's not so bad is it?

There are plenty of other ways that the world can be polluted other than by the car. But - and this is especially true in the UK - it's the easy target syndrome. Sometimes there's a need to bite back.

Ford info courtesy of Paul Wilson - Press Officer