Development of a modular vehicle concept for long-term use taking into account the results of a comparative life cycle inventory study
Mr. Tim Salatzki lives in Hennigsdorf near Berlin and completed his diploma thesis for his studies in automotive engineering at the HTW Berlin in December 2008. The topic of his thesis, which we announced, is: “Development of a modular vehicle concept for long-term use, taking into account the results of a comparative life cycle inventory study.” Essentially, Mr. Salatzki compared two drivers and the environmental impact caused by their vehicles. A driver who has been driving a Citroën DS as his main car since 1972 and has been doing so since then, and a driver who has regularly bought a new car since 1972. The sustainability, i.e. the overall environmental impact of both vehicle uses, is compared and a new vehicle concept is developed from the results. This concept combines the advantages of the more environmentally friendly exhaust emissions of new vehicles with the conservation of resources by remanufacturing old vehicle components, as is done when restoring vintage cars. The thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Werner Stedtnitz from the HTW and our managing director Dipl.-Ing. Roland Kayser, as a lecturer at the HTW.
In summary, we lovers of historic metal can say that classic cars are sometimes wrongly denigrated as “stinkers”. In the overall environmental balance of this comparison, the classic car does perform somewhat worse than the regular purchase of a new car, but the difference is surprisingly small. So small that the result could well be to the detriment of new cars when examining other types of vehicle. Above all, however, the study shows that preserving old vehicles by installing catalytic converters makes sense for environmental reasons! However, since classic cars are registered with the key number 98 in the vehicle documents and this number says nothing about the exhaust gas behavior, it would be time for politicians to create structures here that allow the exhaust gas detoxification of classic cars! In fact, if you have a catalytic converter certified in a classic car, you lose the key number 98 and thus the H license plate that registers the classic car as a historical cultural asset. Installing a catalytic converter in a classic car is currently not permitted by law and that cannot be the case!
If you would like, you can download the thesis here and read it at your leisure.