The real challenge is removing all "smokers"—old and new—from the road.

What percentage of cars are removed from the road to due collisions? An inexpensive car is more likely to be "totaled" by the insurance company and not repaired.

Maybe another reason older cars are on the road longer than before is not their longevity, but that the public is a lot poorer than before. The current administration wided the wealth gap tremendously crippling the buying power of the middle class - which is starting to be evident in the economy. It's a slow but effective economy suffocation through the greed of the few and general shortsightedness. For the environment, what this means is that there are more "rust buckets" out on the road since people's priorities are redeuced to survival - not personal wealth. In Ohio, for example, they did away with the smog check to save $50/yr... out came the dregs on 4 wheels!

This could be a problem, if we're hoping for people to replace their vehicles with some kind of low carbon alternative. Maybe the next big thing will be aftermarket hybrid conversions. I have no idea if that could possibly work, but it sure would be handy.

"A new vehicle emits 98 per cent less toxins into the air than a 15-year-old model."

But does replacing your old vehicle with a new one just because of emissions make environmental sense? That's a lot of metal, plastic and rubber to throw away.

Also, where did they get the 98% figure from? That seems bogus.

In 7 years it's gone from 28% to 43%??? That's extraordinary and quite worrying.

As Shaun mentioned, one should consider the total environmental impact of a car, from cradle to grave. The resources involved in manufacturing a new auto, as well as dealing with an old one at the end of its life are significant. I'd rather see a dirty tail pipe pumping out 10 units of harmful exhaust, than a factory pumping out 20, a scrap yard pumping out another 20, and a bunch of used up materials getting thrown in a landfill.
Keep your old car running until it's no longer economically wise to maintain it, then replace it with something really clean.

Seven years ago was 2000, the end of the 90s boom, after which the US got a mini-recession followed by jobless growth and a rising tide that lifts only yachts under Bush. So I agree with zoltan here, stagnating income and increasing insecurity for the middle class probably has a lot to do with it.

If people do not have the money and financial security to buy a new car every four years, nagging about old cars polluting too much won't help. You can upgrade an old car. Stick a particle filter in it, for instance. The real question is not 'does the production of a new car have a bigger footprint than driving an old car for x years?', but rather 'what is the cheapest way to make the car fleet cleaner?'

> Maybe the next big thing will be aftermarket hybrid conversions.

Or even better: Electric conversions.
I live in Norway and here we have quite a few small electric vehicles that are registered as quadracykles and therefore do not have to pass the same safety-certifications as cars.
A better solution than these unsafe quadracykles - both from a safety- and envionmental viewpoint could be for the government to make it economically attractive to convert 5-10 year old fossil fueled cars into electric cars with modern Lithium or NiMh batteries.

See, I figure i'm doing a GOOD thing by keeping my 1973 Suburban (the ORIGINAL SUV) running clean and smooth so it doesn't end up in a landfill or junkyard, as a previous poster mentioned? It's a fantastic vehicle.

Do I drive it every day? No way--that's what my 2007 Fit is for. But I definitely have need of that Suburban from time to time and I praise Odin I have it and I don't ever plan to get rid of it....there's nothing quite like a 454 engine.

My options would be terrible if I didn't have it and needed it. What should I do--rent something with more rules and less utility?

If we want folks to upgrade to the newer vehicles it's got to make more sense to do so. Registration should probably get higher as they get older, probably tied in some fashion to overall emissions (so if you have an old vehicle that is in fact clean there's no particular penalty...that wouldn't be fair). Tax deductions for buying newer vehicles make some sense, with a preference for buying American. Etc.

Just a couple of thoughts.....we could flesh it out if folks got serious about it.

"A new vehicle emits 98 per cent less toxins into the air than a 15-year-old model."

Actually it really doesn't, as in nearly every case the old vehicle is sold and still in use, just by somebody else. If you sold a running vehicle to a recycling yard, they would probably get more money by selling it for reuse than recycling it!

The problem is they need to get poorly maintained visibly smoking vehicles off the road, but most states "emission test" is merely another tax, and there are loopholes and exemptions that keep highly polluting vehicles on the road.

Around here, you can register the car outside of the city, but the law only requires you to "spend" $1000 in "attempts" to pass the test. After that, you get a "pass"

Profitability is not necessarily a function of production volume, nor probably has much to do with it at all (save any scale economies).

If all cars are lasting longer, and some companies remain very profitable while others don't, then obviously supposed vehicle quality isn't the factor affecting profitability. Oil prices, reliance on light trucks for profits, and different cost structures (non-US companies needn't pay for health care) are what's making the difference at this point.

Also, one reason the average age of vehicles could be increasing is because the number of vehicles per capita keeps increasing, thus the vehicle miles per year for any given vehicle might likely be going down.

I wouldn't read too much into isolated data without studying other things first.

Hmm, having just come back from Cuba - the US cars that were sold there 50-60 years ago are in incredibly good condition for their age, despite an almost complete lack of replacement parts availability. Sure they belch black smoke, but they are an abject lesson in product recyclebility.

You can go either two ways for efficient design:

1. Make the chassis, body, and transmission ultra durable, and have standardized powerplants that are plug-n-play so that users can simply swap to new power technologies as they emerge.

2. Use materials that are easily disassembled by the parent company and are very recyclable into technical nutrients. As new power technologies emerge, cars are returned to the manufacturer and made into new cars.

Option 1 is more eco friendly than option 2. However, image-obsessed consumers want the latest styling fashions, and option 2 more easily satisfies this.

I find it interesting the extent to which a change in business model brought about by sustainability is threating the industry. In other areas (I'm thinking interface's carpets) a move to selling the service of rather than the hardware shifts the emphasis of the manufacturer and has provided quite different opportunities.

Still, in computing we're miles behind, my sample of computers I've used that are still "on the road" gives a 6% return (beating only the Lada). Blevis describes the ipod as a “a deliberately unsustainable act intent on driving consumption and with the clear side effect of premature disposal”.