On the road to zero emissions

The number of motor vehicles in the world will triple by 2050 - but carbon dioxide emissions from vehicle exhausts will have to halve in that time. A big ask? Yes, but it must be done, a Japanese motor industry expert tells Rob Maetzig .
When Michio Shinohara sat down to chat with the news media in Auckland last week, one of the first things he did was to bombard the journalists with some rather sobering statistics.

While the world's motor vehicle fleet is currently less than one billion, the trouble is that more than 60 per cent of that fleet is in developed countries.

Big growth is now taking place in the less developed countries including China and India, warned Mr Shinohara, who is the general manager and chief engineer of Honda Motor Company's environment and safety planning office.

This means that the worldwide fleet is expected to rise to 1.3 billion vehicles inside 20 years, and to two billion by 2050 - a massive increase.

But it is generally recognised that for the sake of the world's environment the amount of carbon dioxide emitted from vehicle exhausts will have to be cut by half during that same time, said Mr Shinohara.

"So this means that by 2050 the average fuel economy of the world's cars will have to be one- sixth of what it was in 2000," he told the journalists.

"Only that way will we be able to achieve the aim of reducing CO2 emissions to 51 grams per kilometre," he added.

It didn't take long for the journalists at the function to absorb the significance of that statement. A CO2 reduction to just 51 g/km is an extraordinarily big ask - after all, even the Honda ultra-low emission vehicles of today pour out considerably more than double that amount.

Not only that, but the next super-efficient Honda to go on the New Zealand market, the new Insight petrol-electric hybrid that is scheduled for launch here in August, will average 101 g/km of CO2. So quite obviously there's going to be a tremendous amount of research and development work required over the next few decades.

"It is a very difficult challenge," admitted Mr Shinohara.

"But we must meet that challenge if we are going to reduce fuel consumption to one- sixth of what it is now." Mr Shinohara was in New Zealand to be a keynote speaker at an Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority- organised biofuels and electric vehicles conference in Wellington.

He has an impressive CV. A Honda employee since 1982 when he joined the company's research and development arm as a mechanical engineer, he has been heavily involved in the development of new-generation petrol and diesel engines, and more recently in environmental and safety planning.

Now he is an integral part of a Honda initiative the company calls Blue Skies For Our Children, and which is researching a wide variety of means of reducing society's impact on the environment, particularly by the motor vehicle.

The future will see a major shift to what Honda describes as electromotive technology, said Mr Shinohara. This will involve continued development of various means of using electricity - either via petrol-electric technology, hydrogen fuel cells, or pure electricity via the use of battery packs.

And each has its challenges: Hybrids need to be made as affordable as ordinary petrol- powered cars, and their performance characteristics need to continue to be improved.

Fuel cell technology is currently far too expensive, so costs need to be dramatically reduced.

There's also a need for consumers to better understand how this technology works so it can become mainstream.

Battery-powered electric vehicles need to be developed so their performance is better, and their range on a single charge needs to be substantially improved.

Cost is a problem, because the price of even the smallest electric car is currently at least double that of a petrol equivalent. And there are also environmental issues over the need for the power source to be renewable. Mr Shinohara sees the immediate future - from Honda's perspective anyway - as primarily involving hybrid vehicles.

"In the long term it will be electric vehicles, because since they have no emissions there is no pollution. They are also quiet and smooth," he said.

"But it will take a long time and a lot of effort to switch to electric cars. So for the time being it will be petrol-electric hybrid vehicles that will be the mainstream. We see the hybrid as the obvious way to go in our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions." Honda has been producing hybrids since 1999, and so far has sold 488,000 of the vehicles and the sales rate is increasing. The Insight was launched in Japan and the United States last year, and already sales have passed 150,000.

Coming up are CR-Z and Jazz hybrids, and these will be followed by further hybrids, said Mr Shinohara.

"At the moment there are production capacity issues, but these will be overcome. We can expect much larger vehicles within the next two years." Meanwhile, research work will continue with fuel cell and full electric vehicles because they will eventually be the future of motoring, he said.

In fact, the fuel cell could represent the future of family living, Mr Shinohara forecast. One of Honda's research projects involves creation of a home energy station that would put natural gas through a reformer to do everything from supplying the hydrogen for the family fuel cell vehicle, to supplying heat and electricity for the home.

Theoretically, such a process could also use solar energy to meet the same ends, he added.

"We think it is possible to create a society where no such things as power lines will be required.

"Honda dreams such a dream of a sustainable society."

Source;
http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/business/3621811/On-the-road-to-zero-emissions