Save our Planet!

Cars consume a lot of energy before they ever make it to the open road. Automotive production leaves a giant footprint because materials like steel, rubber, glass, plastics, paints, and many more must be created before a new ride is ready to roll.

Similarly, the end of a car’s life doesn’t mark the end of its environmental impact. Plastics, toxic battery acids, and other products may stay in the environment. Fortunately, junkyard pile-ups are becoming much smaller than they were in the past. About three-quarters of today’s average car, including the bulk of a steel frame, can be recycled. Production, recycling, and disposal costs to the environment are difficult to quantify and largely beyond the control of most consumers. It's also true that most of an automobile's environmental impact, perhaps 80 to 90 percent, will be due to fuel consumption and emissions of air pollution and greenhouse gases that climate scientists say are driving global warming. Fortunately, the level of that impact is very much under the control of the driver.

Vehicles are America’s biggest air quality compromisers, producing about one-third of all U.S. air pollution. The smog, carbon monoxide, and other toxins emitted by vehicles are especially troubling because they leave tailpipes at street level, where humans breathe the polluted air directly into their lungs. That can make auto emissions an even more immediate health concern than toxins emitted high in the sky by industrial smokestacks.