Australians could’ve saved $716,320,000 in fuel if CO2 legislation had come 3 years earlier
How did Australia get here?
The most efficient versions of vehicle models offered in Australia areconsiderably less efficientthan similar vehicles in other markets.
Australia could increasingly become a dumping ground for the world’s least efficient vehicles with sub-par emissions performance, given our lack of fuel efficiency standards. This leaves us on a dangerous path towards not only higher vehicle emissions, but also higher fuel costs for passenger travel and freight.
Australia has attempted to impose CO₂ or fuel-efficiency standards on light vehicles several times over the past 20 years, but without success. While the federal government was committed to addressing this issue in2015, four years later we are still yet to hear when – or even if – mandatory fuel efficiency standards will ever be introduced.
Thegeneral expectationappears to be that the average CO₂ emission rates of new cars in Australia will reduce over time as technology advances overseas. In the absence of CO₂ standards locally, it is more likely that consumers will continue to not be offered more efficient cars, and pay higher fuel costs as a consequence.
Estimating the fuel savings
Available evidence suggests Australian motorists are paying on average almost30% more for fuel than they shouldbecause of the lack of fuel efficiency standards.
The Australian vehicle fleet uses about32 billion litersof fuel per year.
Using an Australianfleet modeldescribed in the TER report, we can make a conservative estimate that the passenger vehicle fleet uses about half of this fuel: 16 billion liters per year. New cars entering the fleet each year would represent about 5% of this: 800 million liters per year.
Soassumingthat mandatory CO₂ standards improve fuel efficiencyby 27%, fuel savings would be 216 million liters per year.
In the last three years,the average fuel priceacross Australia’s five major cities is A$1.33 per liter. This equates to a total savings of A$287 million per year, although this would be about half the first year as new cars are purchased throughout the year and travel less, and would reduce as vehicles travel less when they age.
The savings are accumulative because a car purchased in a particular year continues to save fuel over the following years.
The table below shows a rough calculation of savings over the three year period (2016-2018), for new cars sold in the same period (Model Years 2016, 2017, and 2018).
As a result, over a period of three years, A$1.3 billion in potential savings for car owners would have accumulated.
Policy has come close, but what are we waiting for?
The Australian government is not progressing with any measures to introduce a fuel efficiency target. In fact, it recently labeled Labor’s proposed fuel efficiency standard as a “car tax.”
But Australia has come close to adopting mandatory vehicle CO₂ emission standards in the past.
In late 2007, the Labor government committed to cutting emissions to achieve Australia’s obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. The then prime minister, Kevin Rudd,instructedthe Vehicle Efficiency Working Group to:
Then, in 2010, the Labor government decided mandatory CO₂ emissions standards would apply to new light vehicles from 2015. But a change in government in 2013 meant these standards did not see the light of day.
Things looked promising again when the Coalition government released aVehicle Emissions Discussion Paperin 2016, followed by a draftRegulation Impact Statementin the same year.
The targets for adopting this policy in 2025, considered in the draft statement, were marked as “strong” (105g of CO₂ per km), “medium” (119g/km), and “mild” (135g/km) standards.
Under all three targets, there would be significant net cost savings. But since 2016, the federal government has taken no further action.
It begs the question: what exactly are we waiting for?
The technical state of play
Transport Energy/Emission Research conductedpreliminary modelingof Australian real-world CO₂ emissions.
This research suggests average CO₂ emission rates of the on-road car fleet in Australia are actually increasing over time and are, in reality, higher than what is officially reported in laboratory emissions tests.
In fact, the gap between mean real-world emissions and the official laboratory tests is expected to grow from 20% in 2010 to 65% in 2025.
This gap is particularly concerning when we look at the lack of support for low-emissions vehicles like electric cars.
Given that fleet turnover is slow, the benefits of fuel efficiency standards would only begin to have a significant effect several years into the future.
With continuing population growth, road travel will only increase further. This will put even more pressure on the need to reduce average real-world CO₂ emission rates, given the increasingenvironmentalandhealthimpacts of the vehicle fleet.
Even if the need to reduce emissions doesn’t convince you, the cost benefits of emissions standards should. The sale of less efficient vehicles in Australia means higher weekly fuel costs for car owners, which could be avoided with the introduction of internationally harmonized emissions legislation.
This article is republished fromThe ConversationbyRobin Smit, Adjunct professor,The University of Queensland;Jake Whitehead, Research Fellow,The University of Queensland, andNic Surawski, Lecturer in Environmental Engineering,University of Technology Sydneyunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
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Story byThe Conversation
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