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What Makes A Car Green?
Electric cars are getting a lot of buzz, but there's much more to a green car than the power train. Here are some areas with great potential.
Doug Smock, contributing editor -- Design News, November 10, 2009
We've all heard about the Chevy Volt. It's a plug-in electric vehicle that gets 230 mpg. But there's another green story taking place in automotive design that gets little attention. Researchers at companies such as Ford are investing lots of time and money into making a "sustainable" car. That is, a car that uses as many sustainable materials as possible. Big progress has already been made on the use of soy-based materials to replace hydrocarbons in seat foams.
Castor oil is also being used now (on a very limited basis) to make plastic components for automotive radiators. A few models from Japan use natural fibers such as kenaf to reinforce plastics, reducing the demand for glass reinforcements, which are heavy and energy-intensive to produce. Ford researchers even hope to develop plastic components that are compostable when the car is trashed.
Here are highlights of activities that will make cars greener.
 MOLDED BIOPLASTIC PARTS Toyota is the leader in the use of plant-derived plastics in cars. Thirty percent of the combined interior and trunk of the 2010 HS 250h Lexus is made of what Toyota calls "Ecological PlasticsTM," that is plastic based on polylactic acid derived from corn, sugarcane or some other plant. By 2014 Toyota wants 20 percent of the plastics used in cars to be derived from plants or recycled from some other source. |
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CASTOR OIL RADIATOR TANK |
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Ford pioneered the replacement of hydrocarbon polyols with soy-based polyols used in flexible foams for seats and other interior applications. Soy foam will be used in more than 1 million Ford, Lincoln and Mercury vehicles this year, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by more than 5 million lb. |
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PLANT-BASED FABRICS |
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KENAF-FIBER REINFORCEMENT |
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RECYCLED PLASTICS OEMS are looking for ways to reuse plastics. The side door window retainers in the 2009 Chevy Traverse use recycled material. More than 23,000 lb of recycled material can be used annually for this part. A trunk sill plate in the Cadillac STS uses more than 8,300. More than 4,595 tons of polymeric parts in the model are now marked for recycling. |
