But is it sustainable motoring?


This caught my eye the other day. Dodge says its Zeo concept sport wagon shown at the Paris Show is "designed for driving enthusiasts and tree-huggers alike". That’s me! It's a four-passenger sport wagon, powered by a single 268-horsepower electric motor with a lithium-ion battery. With rear wheel drive it can do 0-60 in 5.7 seconds and go 250 miles (400 km) between charges - once the technology is perfected.

So long as the technology works, I can fix it and afford it (economically and environmentally) I'll have one.

But I can't have one now because the technology is not tried and tested. The Chrysler Corporation is working with "multiple suppliers" on developing batteries that deliver a 300 mile range. The favourite power source seems to be lithium-ion batteries like that in my cordless Dremel although they'll probably be a bit bigger. And take longer to re-charge.

In other words the Dodge Zeo doesn't actually go yet.

And when it does become available, the manufacturers are going to have to recoup their colossal investment.

Ever heard of the product life cycle? It charts the production and use that you can expect to get out of a manufactured good. Product life cycles have to be carefully controlled so that they don't overlap, otherwise profits can suffer if the return on the investment is not realised. So we're going to have to wait for groovy stuff like the Dodge Zeo - even once they've sorted out the R&D issues - until less radical products have had their day. But this is just what concept cars are supposed to do - give us a tantalising view of the future.

I will admit to being tantalised. Much as I like the old internal combustion engine, the Pontiac Zeo looks like fun.

I'd be interested to know how long its expected life span would be. Will the infrastructure to support it blossom like a flower in the desert and then die away as the next new thing comes along? Or is this the start of something as long lived as the steam engine or the Diesel engine?

Will we be scrapping Dodge Zeos in fifteen years time becasue they're too expensive to fix? Will the batteries be unique like they are in my video camera? Will hotrodders soup up Zeos in fifty years time with domestic hadron colliders?

I 'd like to think they will be but the Zeo will more likely be disposed of as a piece of WEEE - that's Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment.

Here is the WEEE Man. He lives just down the road from me (in global terms at any rate) at the Eden Project. I've met him and he's a dude. His aim in life is to meet people and make the world a better place. No really - he's going to do this by making us aware of the amount of electrical rubbish we produce. In Britain we produce 3.3 tonnes of it in our lifetime. In the states they produce even more per person and the figure is growing no matter where you live. So the WEEE Man has a tough job on his hands. He's not so wee, either, for he stands at 7 metres tall and weighs - funny old thing - 3.3 metric tonnes.

Have a look at the WEEE Man's website. It contains some mind boggling statistics. British citizens discard 15 millions mobile phones each year. That's the impact of getting bored with your phone and shows how easily we can be manipulated into obeying the product life cycle propaganda. A 24kg desktop PC will use ten times its weight in fossil fuels, materials and chemicals during its lifetime. That's a quarter of a ton of hidden impact.

If increasing amounts of WEEE are a problem, then I'd like to keep my old internal combustion engines, thanks very much, and run them on renewable alcohol based fuels. Or I'll adapt them to run on hydrogen produced with electricity generated from solar, wave and wind power. When the time comes when my Dodge Zeo won't boot up, I'll stuff a Rover V8 into it.

I know how Vintage Things operate and I can still fix 'em so long as there aren't too many sealed units. The adjective vintage has connotations of lengevity and that has to be a good thing, especially if they provide sustainable motoring.

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