Automobile Manufactures are Worse than Big Tobacco. China Should Bring Them Down.

Just shy of 7,000,000 people die each year due to tailpipe emissions from cars.

 Imagine that you are a manager at Toyota and your engineer presents some options for car features in a meeting. The engineer tells you that with no pollution controls, the entry level model of their Hilux diesel truck will cost $15,000. If production targets are met, she says, the pollution from this model will kill about 35 people compared to a model with modern pollution controls. For an additional $700, the number of deaths can be reduced to 17. Now, imagine that your analyst recommends going without any pollution controls, as the $15,000 price point is optimal. The production lead agrees but the decision is yours. What do you do?

 That scenario is not a fabrication. Management at every car company is aware of the trade off between lives and the investments that they make in their automobiles. In low- and middle-income countries, there are few checks on tailpipe emissions, so there is no financial incentive to upcharge customers for pollution control devices. Only ethics stand between sales and lives lost with a rough number of deaths pinned to the cost. Time and again, management chooses deaths over costs. How, you might ask, can management at a car or tobacco company choose sales over human lives and still sleep at night?

 The other day, I was talking with a Thai person who mentioned that she did not have automatic door locking on her Toyota. The doors were still locked by a switch on the passenger door that is controlled by software, but automatic locking was a feature only available on the premium model. Automatic locks save the occasional child or elderly person who tries to open the door in while the car is moving. This feature is cost-saving for manufacturers to add (it actually costs more to have two pieces of software code, so it is cheaper to just make automatic locking a standard feature). But "automatic locking" looks nice on a list of reasons why consumers should buy their most expensive models and provides a justification for paying more for a fancier model. So they remain a feature and not a part of every automobiles set of safety measures.

 Without federal regulations in the US, car makers might upcharge for safety belts and would certainly upcharge for air bags. (I say “certainly,” because they are a feature only available on premium models in countries that do not require them by law.)

 The diesel dilemma

 When gasoline or diesel is burned, it spews out PM 2.5 and other pollutants. PM 2.5 shaves IQ points off children, speeds up cellular aging by causing mutations in DNA, causes cancer, and contributes to heart disease. Diesel cars also produce greenhouse gases, accelerating global warming. Everyone in society is exposed, so everyone suffers when drivers “choose” diesel vehicles over cleaner energy vehicles.

 For decades, western car makers have gotten away with selling diesel cars and trucks with few emissions controls on them even as gasoline alternatives were available. In 2015, Volkswagen was famously caught for cheating emissions tests on its cars and trucks using software that, like manual door locking, costs good money to develop. This "defeat device" allowed the car to reduce emissions during testing. Again, money was spent to kill people. "Dieselgate" caused an uproar in the US and Europe and VW was sued.

 Defeat devices killed hundreds or thousands of people in countries with heavy tailpipe regulations. But in other countries, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, Toyota, Ford, and many other manufacturers continue to this day to sell cars in lower-income nations that emit much higher amounts of lethal toxins than vehicles in richer nations.

 The car manufacturers might argue that they could not compete against other carmakers if they tried to clean up their emissions. They might also argue that governments enable car manufacturers to kill by allowing the sale of diesel or, in some cases, less clean petrol in fuel stations. Another argument is that consumers have a choice. But companies certainly do not provide their customers with the number of deaths they will cause if the buy one model or the other.

 Of course, I'm using diesel as an example because it is such an easily slain villain. It is something we can all wrap our heads around, yet it is so difficult to do politically. Now, we have the technology to not only ban diesel, but to ban all fossil fuels. So why don't we?

 Only a few nations are up to the challenge. Norway has mandated battery-only vehicle sales for 2025. China has gone much further still, pinning its economic prospects on electric cars, batteries, and solar panels.

 Enter the dragon

 Few people outside of China have a sense of what the country has achieved. A nation infamous for terrible air quality has, in just a few years, cleaned up its skies. Just a few years ago, air pollution was killing 2 million Chinese people annually according to the World Health Organization.

 But since that study, China has invested heavily in efforts to clean up the air, including building a massive and modern electric car industry. These cars now dominate new sales and are projected to reach 10% of all cars on the road this year. The air is noticeably cleaner now, and the roads quietly buzz with the light sound of tires against the pavement, rather than roar with the sound of petrol engines. The cars look more like they were designed by Phillip K Dick rather than stamped out of metal. Safety features such as automatic braking are standard on most cars. One BYD model becomes a boat if trapped in a flood, and all of their 4-wheel motor models can pivot 90 degrees if trapped in debris (or caught in a tight parking spot). Airbags are standard.

 Thailand’s roads are starting to look just as futuristic as China’s. It has welcomed an influx of cars from China’s innovative manufacturers. The logarithmic increase in battery-only cars from China is being paid for by Chinese government subsidies, and Thais are not complaining. In Thailand, a luxury battery-only SUV can compete with Germany on quality and Japan on price.

 But price isn’t the only thing driving sales. People are increasingly aware that air pollution is making them sick, and they don’t want a car that produces toxins from its exhaust pipe. So, Toyota and Ford are paying the price for their lethal and unethical decisions of the past.

 Good on China. Bring on your futuristic, lifesaving cars. If wealthy nations that make fossil fuel vehicles want to protect their industry by banning Chinese imports, their people will pay the price in terms of lost IQ, premature aging, high rates of disease, and high rates of death from injury.