Red turns to Green: Ferrari contemplates how to meet new EU CO2 limits
With European Union regulators preparing to clamp down on automotive carbon dioxide emissions, the lower volume manufacturers of high performance cars are wondering how they can possibly meet the new requirements. This conundrum may be partly behind why Porsche has recently taken a controlling interest in Volkswagen. Presumably the fleet average will be a weighted calculation over all the vehicles produced by a company. One company almost never thought of when considering green anything (except for cash) is Ferrari. The home of the prancing stallion makes a few thousand of the most expensive, beautiful, fast and thirsty cars on the planet every year. Meeting any kind of CO2 emissions limit would be nearly impossible on their own without destroying the essence of what a Ferrari is. Nonetheless they must find a way.
One part of the plan will surely involve lumping their fleet in with 85 percent stakeholder FIAT but they will likely go further than that. Diesels have apparently been ruled out as has biofuel, although eliminating ethanol as an option seems silly. Ferrari could surely do a turbocharged ethanol burner that would achieve their required levels of performance. The company has pulled some of the Formula One engineers into the the discussions and options like hybrids are being considered and elements like regen braking, start-stop, and direct injection would seem like obvious choices. Will they follow Tesla's lead away from internal combustion altogether? Unlikely, but you never know.
[Source: Elmundo.es via MotorAuthority]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
A.Brien 12:17PM (5/31/2007)
I hope that goverments stop ruling the car markets and people should buy what they want and they choose how much fuel they need or if they want new technologies goverment should permits manufacturers to sell fuel cell, electric, diesel, gasoline, big or small. The consumer have way of life too. We should be more easy on natural ressources and permits more production if it's needed.
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Scatter 12:47PM (5/31/2007)
Manufacturers are free to develop new technologies but in many cases have resisted or not got very far having spent a lot of money; people are free to buy what they want so they've ended up buying unnecessarily big, polluting cars; and we've been free to extract as much natural resources as we want for the past 100 years and look at where we are now!
So your proposal is not that different to the situation we have now and that hasn't exactly worked out for us! People need to be guided by regulations - sadly we don't spontaneously work together for the common good
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Phil L. 1:35PM (5/31/2007)
Though government regulations have had a way of inspiring unintended consequences.
The implementation of the original US CAFE laws had an important role in popularizing the SUV - and the disappearing act of the family-sized station wagon.
Also, the timing and details of US emissions standards has all but eliminated family-friendly diesel options until just recently. Meanwhile, diesels in Europe have flourished, helped along by favorable environmental regulations.
I'm still hoping for an affordable diesel minivan (I've got three kids in car seats), but the DCX split means I've given up on a Bluetec Grand Caravan.
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Joseph 6:20PM (5/31/2007)
This is ridiculous! Is the EU really going to control a low-volume manufacturer that purely makes sports car??? There should be an exception for low-volume sports cars!
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Scatter 2:13PM (5/31/2007)
True enough - they do need to be ballanced and well thought out. The strictness of your emissions laws is quite surprising. Is the air quality over there really that bad and is it due to vehicles? Or would it get that much worse if modern diesels were allowed? We manage to survive quite nicely here in Europe!
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Mulad 2:15PM (5/31/2007)
What does 130g/km work out to in miles per gallon? Heh, sorry to ask that, but those are the numbers I'm most accustomed to thinking in... Anyway, from a quick search, it seems that it works out to about 48 mpg (US). Wow, that's steeper than I expected. They're already looking to balance it out by averaging things across the Fiat group as well, but considering that the Ferrari fleet average seems to be around 12 mpg, a few miracles may still be in order. Ignoring the gains from balancing with Fiat, a Tesla Roadster-like vehicle would help tremendously, but they'd still have to make up about 20% of your sales (give or take quite a bit depending on how exactly you calculate CO2 output of an electric).
Still, how many Ferrari owners are going to drive their cars 12,000 miles a year? They really ought to get some credit since the average mileage would rarely exceed 1/4 of that.
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COINTELPRO 3:30AM (6/01/2007)
What the government should be regulating is the type of fuels at the pump. (E85,hydrogen,electric). Auto manufacturer won't build these car if customers can't refill them easily.
Government should step in like they did for HDTV for the industry. If there was no deadlines or mandates, we would still be watching analog signals. The industry utilized these mandates for their benefit, it made capital investment decisions easier to make since a market would be guaranteed.
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Will 7:30AM (6/01/2007)
Ferrari could always consider doing what Koenigsegg did with the CCXR- that is, converting existing models to run on E85- and thus reaping the benefits of higher octane ratings for even more Ferraristi-pleasing power. Running on biofuel could at least stave off the EU, in spite of the fact that the environmental benefits of ethanol are tempered by the fossil fuels used to create and process it.
When fleet averages are calculated, do they account for how many of each vehicle are sold? If so, subsuming Porsche under VW and Ferrari under Fiat should solve the regulation problem, as a couple thousand 430s could easily be offset by the several hundred thousand Fiat Pandas sold every year.
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