I have Hybrid buyers remorse!

I am not your average car buyer. I have bought very few cars over my years as I tend to keep them until they finally give up the ghost and are no more. Regular trade-ins, what’s that? I am one odd member of the consumer car industry. I have bought 3 new cars since I got my licence all the way back in the 1980’s, and now I have added number 4, which has been the game changer. However, as an Urban Designer I have buyer’s remorse about my sustainable hybrid car!

When I buy a new car, I spend considerable time researching and comparing models, learning about their efficiencies, lifetime costs and so on. It is what I do professionally, I make decisions based on what I learn, as I aim to limit my mistakes as much as possible.

For instance, in 2006 when living in metropolitan Melbourne, with its tighter built environment of roads and parking I ended up purchasing a VW Golf, with a Mark 5 diesel engine. Its efficiency was outstanding, 5 litres / 100km, incredible torque to take on long accustomed Australian highway driving. Nibble and versatile around the city and small enough to resolve any parking problem. More importantly it had the new ISO baby seat connections for our expected first born and we wanted her to be a safe as all parents do.

We kept this car since that time, and during our overseas appointments it was carefully stored and ready for when we visited and eventually returned. The car has now become the responsibility of that expected baby who has now obtained a driver’s licence of her own and joined this illustrative club.

I choose diesel because I knew I could easily convert it to organic oil-based fuels if needed, VW had assured me that their diesel engines were the cleanest around, better than petrol alternatives. Perhaps, as it turned out via the ‘dieselgate’ scandal I should’ve dug a bit deeper on those dubious claims!

Today, I worry as an urban designer of the rise of lung cancer in people who never did the things commonly associated with this disease, such as smoking, removing asbestos or working in smelter factories, etc. Yet having lived along main streets and advocating this built environment because I practice what I preach, I have had to clean away diesel grim, braking dust and other bio-hazards that make up this lifestyle, and it has me worried.

I advocated denser centres, increased public transit investment, mixed uses that require people and the delivery resources to maintain this consumption. It was in the name of efficiency, sustainable development, what I was thought, learnt and fine-tuned how to do it better.

It was always given that main roads and the many streets that support urban environments would always need to be there. I have never argued against people’s right to own or operate a car, I would definitely prefer and support public transit options over cars, and today this is my signature urban planning response.

I was even involved in planning a city where internal combustion engines (ICE) were excluded to the periphery and only electric vehicles were allowed access to internal mobility networks. At the time it didn’t excite me that this was a very good thing, I generally thought the policy was a bit excessive but thought why not, what do we have to lose. I didn’t have skin in the game as I was not a car lover but my concerns were on the equity provided for public transit investment.

Upon reflection, I think everyone has skin in this game! However, we do not get a chance to choose and are at the mercy of others who simply put profit over life, and that is what scares me the most.

As you get older the more you realise your mortality and cancer becomes even more of a masthead in your worldview. By the time you are 50, there is a very big chance that close friends and family have fallen victims to this disease, and it makes you think. It is very very rare for Cancer to just appear, for you are constantly fighting against its invasion, your body usually is extremely good at dealing with it when you are young, unfortunately for some even the young can perish.

Things we do, places we go, our environments we live in are the battlegrounds that our bodies are constantly safeguarding us. However, as stated earlier lung cancer is growing around the world despite the fight to remove asbestos, the cultural shift away from cigarette smoking. The biggest exposure issue is air pollution, especially as diesel fumes can be absorbed directly into the bloodstream when inhaled. 

Two big issues, increasing car ownership and urban pollution is what we need to keep an eye on. In Australia car ownership is increasing 2.3% yearly on average, similar rises across the globe with China more than double this. Rising urban pollution has the top three countries Bangladesh, Pakistan and India exceeding levels 10 times over the World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines continuously for the past 6 years. China is ranked 19th, has managed to maintain and slightly reduce its 5-7 times above the WHO guidelines despite its growing car ownership. Australia can probably thank its low density and large land mass for its 128th position rather than any meaningful attempt to reduce pollution.

Urban Policies around the world are still predicated to suburban rollout, miles and miles of asphalt to carry the ever-increasing demands of car ownership. Whether it be in urban consolidation which of course is my preferred model of development, but one thing is quite obvious, we as urban designers, planners, politicians, developers, engineers, whoever is involved in the built environment profession is explicit in the exposure of people to a very toxic lifestyle that may or may not be a reason for their early demise.

The car manufacturers aren’t let off that easily either, for they are even more so responsible, for they know their product is dangerous yet do not properly inform the users of these health dangers. They spend the profits from their car sales to lobby governments to look the other way, to support the infrastructure policies that maintain their factories, and keep contaminating the unsuspected who have been sold on the urban and suburban lifestyles built on fume emitting death machines.

Just think about it, there are significant labels on smoking packets, yet none on cars. Why, because they have lobbied for insufficient emissions controls that are easily bypassed or defeated by pandering to the misled populace by a well-oiled ‘pun intended’ marketing machine with its only goal to defend profits for the shareholders and executives.

I was complicit as an urban designer, complicit is not challenging the norm, not investigating the real impacts of the built environment I promoted, but this has to stop. Today we have the technology to decrease urban air pollution, rid ourselves of the toxic fumes that may or may not be our own killer in the future. Who knows, who is prepared to roll the dice against cancer, and especially as they are on the rise. If Rome, Paris and Oslo can ban diesel cars by 2024, then why can’t we?

So why do I have buyer’s remorse of the sustainable hybrid I just bought? My regret is that I didn’t go fully EV and discarded the ICE technology once and for all. It is because I have once again been hoodwinked by an industry that just doesn’t care. Hybrid’s, still include an ICE, they still pollute. The saving grace is that my model has the ability to turn off the ICE and just run on pure EV mode for around 100km before needing to recharge.

I went solar years ago, and have so much generated power that to recharge every day is not an issue, my car battery is only 18kW, I produce over 50kW per day, and as soon as I fully invest in home batteries, I will deprive the grid of my resource that they pay little for and then charge me exuberant prices for each kilowatt.

The fear of being stranded without power is number one issue fed to us by a media industry devoid of any intellectual knowledge of the real issues of urban development and the need to move beyond a fossil fuel existence. They have been lied too by the car industry and are now passing these lies on to the consumer, without real facts and reason.

Why do we fear change? isn’t human advancement about embracing new ideas and discarding old ones. Isn’t it about meeting a challenge head on instead of mildly stewing in our polluting world.

Who would’ve known back then that a city that limits ICE vehicles is by far more forward thinking than maintaining the craziness of maintaining the status quo. Today there is no reason to support the ICE based industry, we have the technology, we have the products, but do we have the fortitude and strength of the political will to do the right thing for our citizens. Why is it that China claims almost 50% of its new cars are now EV’s and this will only continue to grow as their new technologies are leaving legacy manufactures in the dust. Yet the western media over-reaction when EV sales rise to 8% seems so odd in this futuristic world, did we back the wrong horse and now can’t get a refund!

Perhaps soon, someone will start to investigate the links between ICE cars and lung cancer and question when they knew, just like the tobacco industry. But this time hopefully we will be smarter and not let them off the hook as easily.

We know the facts as urban designers, urban planners, policy makers and as individuals, it is now that we must practice what we preach and not be persuaded otherwise. Let’s not have buyer’s remorse of the skills and knowledge we have developed as professionals.