Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecky
Well yes, but they're not held to the same standards (obviously).
I risk playing the devil's advocate here because I'm a huge fan of keeping classic cars on the road, despite their higher pollution - I honestly don't care if it's a tiny minority of cars - but the standards for a '66 are probably very low, considering it wasn't until the mid 70's that catalytic converters became (almost) necessary to pass emissions. I'm curious what the absolute numbers are.
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Plus the few that are out there don't get anywhere near driven the 15,000 miles per year the average new car does.
Those old cars are loved and kept in better tune then when they were just say 10 years old, and being used by poorer people as daily transportation. kept in top tune a carb does pretty well with emissions, and they aren't driven as much in the dead of winter when they take a long warmup to get them running right.
Pages 4,5,and 6 of this old EPA document shows the average of what a car from a certain year produced. I would argue the current crop of 1964 or whatever year classic is well above those numbers because of what I mentioned above. I don't know what was classified as a greenhouse gas in 1970, but for the average 1970 car, adding all 3 tables together I get 79 gr/mile. Just looking up a 2017 Chevy Equinox on fueleconomy.gov it says 347 gr/mile of just tailpipe CO2, apparently CO2 wasn't even on the radar in 1970, and today we don't list the stuff from 1970, I don't know how to compare them.
https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyNET.exe/...kPage=x&ZyPURL