The cheapest car that does less than 7l/100KM is the Kia Picanto with 6.9l/100KM. The Picanto has recently undergone a facelift and not only offers excellent value for money but also great economy.

Next we have the Daihatsu Charade. Again the car has recently undergone an external makeover. The car has a one liter engine which uses a tiny 5.3l/100KM of fuel. This is the only “really small” car that offers such good economy.

Next we have the Peugot 107 and the Citroen C1. The reason I place these two together is that not only do they use the same engine (which is also the same as the Diahatsu above) but they are technically the same car with a different exterior. Both consume a paltry 5.7l/100KM. Despite only having a 35 liter tank you’ll still get over 600 kilometers on a tank which is pretty impressive. Despite the same engine, these cars are larger than the Daihatsu and thus use more petrol to move that mass.

The next option is the Proton Savvy which uses 6.52l/100KM. Pricing is very competitive and the spec is high in this car making it an under-rated purchase. Considering Proton is hardly a well proven name I’d still choose the Peugot or the Citroen.

There’s also the Fiat Panda 1.2 which uses 6.8l/100KM but frankly I’ve heard so many nightmare stories about Fiat after-sale service in South Africa I’d stay far away from a Fiat until the situation improves.

Again using the same 1 liter engine as the Daihatsu, Peugot and the Citroen the Toyota Yaris T1 is the largest of the four and thus uses 6.4l/100KM. I’m not a fan of Toyota in South Africa as I find them over priced and underspecced. This is a solid car with good service backup but lacks extras such as airconditioning that the Peugot or Citroen will include at the same price. That said it’s a bigger car so if you need the size then this is the best choice of the four.

Higher up one the pricing spectrum is the Mazda 2. Not only is this the South African car of the year but also the World Car of the year. The 1.3 engine produces a nippy 62KW of power while only using 6.5l of petrol/100KM. If I was in the market to buy a new car I’d totally get one of these. They look great, are well spec’d and well priced.

Finally there is the 1.3 liter Yaris T3 which again is over priced for what you get but only uses 6.8l/100 KM which is actually awfully close to the 1 liter version. In a similar price range is the entry level Smart ForTwo which is also very frugal at 5.6l/100KM but is over priced for what little you get.

Honourable mentions go out to the following which just missed the 7l/100KM cut off:

The Mazda 2 1.5 which uses 7.2l/100KM and the Mini Cooper which uses 7.2l/100KM.

All in all it’s particularly difficult to find a petrol engined car that uses less than 7 liters per hundred kilometers. To get good consumption on a larger car you either need a Diesel or a Hybrid which are still prohibitively expensive. Legislation is creating a need for more efficient engines but this will only be in full force in 2015. Until then if you want to be a bit greener and use less petrol then these are your choices.

Since it’s a relatively slow day today I’ve got a motley assortment of random blog topics to talk about. The first
is Greenprint and the rest will follow later.

For those of us who work in an office we all know that wasted paper is a major issue in terms of cost, wastage and just generally feeling bad for wasting that paper. You generally feel like you’re destroying the earth page by page. If you’re like me then you know that this is an illogical thought but again, if you’re like me then you’re crazy and illogical so no logic makes sense anyway! Phew, that was quite a sentence.

To solve this moral quandary of paper wastage a new “patent-pending” product has been released. The product is called Greenprint and basically what it does is cleverly analyses what your printing out and if it is an almost blank page it’ll alert you and give you the option not to print that page. Greenprint uses this example:

The software solves a problem nearly everyone can relate to: The ubiquitous wasted page. This is the page with just a URL, banner ad, legal disclaimer, etc. These wasted pages occur many times a day littering homes and offices around the world and wasting money, trees, and time.

Another cool feature is the ability to create PDF documents instead of printing them out thus saving even more paper and in the long run trees. The site quotes a figure saying that if every computer used the software then 36 million trees could be saved. Whether this is a wildly outrageous figure or not, every little bit counts and only you can start to make that difference. If you consider how much it costs to produce paper as well as the costs of ink cartridges.

I’d recommend the software to all big offices as the amount of paper wastage is atrocious but this is a perfect compliment to any computer attached to a printer.

Go download the software and save a tree; it eliminates a lot of guilt.
The site with all download links can be found here

As I said earlier today in the news there are reports that Eskom and the big gold mines are negotiating a settlement whereby Eskom will provide uninterrupted power to the mines in exchange for these mines lowering their power usage by ten percent. The issue here is the ridiculous clause in that Eskom can’t actually provide uninterrupted power so they will inform the mines four hours before power will be cut off.

So this is the future huh?

Can you imagine building a new house in the next few years… Not only will you need to have a building inspector but also an Eskom employee who will negotiate how much power you can use. I can imagine the situation:

Eskom employee: “So what is the purpose of this building”
You: “Home office Sir”
Eskom employee: “So it would seem that you have four lights in this office. I’ll make you a deal: remove one lamp and we’ll tell you four hours before the power goes off so you can turn your expensive generator on. Deal?”
You: “Bastard!”

As we can see from the somewhat stylized attempt at humour above I have actually discovered the real reason behind load shedding. Eskom, being a government owned company is under directives from the head honchos above them to provide more jobs. With the insane amount of building going on and the amount of offices and homes being inhabited these days thousands upon thousands of new employees will be needed to go “police the power”. That is to say that those thousands of Eskom employees will need to be in constant contact with business and home owners negotiating power reductions in exchange for a more user friendly load shedding schedule. You see, what we face is not a power crisis but a massive employment drive and frankly that’s what the country needs. I’m really glad that we’re going to solve the employment problem and cut back on South Africa’s contribution to global warming.

Good job Eskom, you guys rock my world.

(the sarcasm ends here if you hadn’t noticed)

Yet another slightly car related but more save the world type of post. Today I present to you the case of how speed bumps are not only damaging our cars suspension but also destroying our world! I must admit, I do sometimes think speed bumps are useful: specifically for those idiots (usually Citi Golf drivers) who feel the need to “pimp their rides” and lower their cars to about 4 millimeters above the road.

The Automobile Association (the AA to the layman) in the UK commissioned a research project to discover whether slowing down when assaulting a speed bump affected the environment. Basically what they found that a car that gets 4.7 liters per hundred kilometers gets bumped (haha) down to 9.11 liters per hundred kilometers when having to slow down then speed up as is the usual behaviour for a driver traversing the average speed island. Basically what they found was that slowing down from 50Km/h down to 30 Km/h not only kills your good fuel consumption but also increases the release of Carbon Monoxide and Nitrous Oxide.

The issue in my mind though is that a speed bump is a necessary evil to slow commuters down but a solution to this problem needs to be found. It’s obvious that these speed reducers are damaging to our cars as well as causing pollution but in South Africa where our drivers are lawless at best we need some sort of way to slow them down.

My solution to the problem: create a speed bump that raises and lowers. The system would track your speed at a point close to the hump and either raise or lower the speed bump depending on your speed and how much you would need to slow down. Another solution is the implementation of fixed speed cameras. I’ve noticed how they do this in Cape Town: everyone speeds until they get to a certain point where they slow to the speed limit and then speed up after the camera.

Whatever the solution we need to remove these car-destroying humps from our landscape at once or suffer the increase pollution, raised fuel consumption and thus environmental damage.

An interesting question that came to me the other day was whether I would pay more for a car that was not only greener in terms of emissions and used less petrol. The logic is applied to Diesel engines, you pay extra but you save on not only fuel mileage but on the slightly cheaper price of diesel fuel.

What I find the most interesting is what has recently occurred in both France and Finland:

Any vehicle that emits more than 160 g/km of carbon dioxide will be charged a tax ranging from €200 up to a maximum of €2,600 for vehicles that emit of 250 g/km. Cleaner cars that emit less than 130 g/km will get rebates starting from €200 right up to a maximum of €1,000 for cars like the diesel Smart and VW Polo BlueMotion that produce less than 100 g/km.

I find this brilliant, it’s similar to England’s “SUV tax” where large bodied, high polluting cars are taxed but in this case a bonus is given to the car buyer with a conscious.

Take the new Fiat 500, a car to be released in South Africa in 2008. The Fiat emits around 111 g/km of CO2 which means it is in line for around 700 euro bonus. For a car that costs around 12000 Euro’s, produces a smaller amount of waste and sips small amounts of petrol you’ve got a winner.

This brings me back though to the question of would I buy a greener car at a price. I think I speak for most people when I say I would like to buy a car that was greener but I’m not sure I would. Maybe it’s my inherent suspicion for new fads but what sort of different does it make for say a 130 g/km of CO2 emission vs say a 150 g/km emission? Over the lifetime of a car will it make any difference to the environment? Are we really going after the smaller polluters, such as 20 grams per kilometer of carbon dioxide emissions that a small car produces, or should we be going after big business or even cows? I guess I’d buy a car that emits less pollution purely because it generally uses less petrol.

It’ll be interesting to see how the situation pans out but in the mean time fuel efficiency seems to be the leading factor in engineering while emissions are secondary. I applaud countries like France for what they are doing with offering rebates for lower emissions. In South Africa we could really use a tactic like that with all the old cars on the road. In the future it is critical for car maker to quite simply make a plan: looks like they are trying.

I recently found this site which gives you the financial implications of leaving your TV, gaming console or even a radio. If you look at the site, you’ll see a computer uses about 311 kilowatt hours when it is passive standby mode (the computer is off but the internal clock is still ticking to keep time). Electricity costs roughly 44 cents per kilowatt hour in South Africa which means a cost of R136.84 per year simply to keep the computer off but with the outlet it is plugged into still on. The moral: turn the power off when you don’t need the computer and not just the machine, unplug it from the wall or turn off the power strip.

If you thought that was a lot of electricity, take a look at the Plasma screen and how much power it draws. In active standby mode (which it stays in so it can power up faster) the screen uses as much as 1,452 kilowatt hours. Translated into a rand value this costs around R639 a year.

While each individual amount might not seem like that much (since I’ve used the two biggest items in terms of wastage) each item in a house such as a microwave, VCR, DVD, Video game console, Fridge and Cellphone charger that are all sucking power and costing you money. In total you could save over a grand a year on electricity bills. This might not seem like a lot of money but considering how often our power seems to be going off theses days, Eskom could use all the savings we can give them.

All this power use is known as “Vampire Power” and is simply wasted on items that do not require power unless being used. Turn off the devices and you’ll save the environment one bit at a time. If everyone turned off one of these items there would be a huge surge in available power.

Shut it down and save not only money but the environment, it simply makes sense.