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g/km CO2?

Andy McGhee

Enthusiast
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Is anyone on the forum able to calculate accurate g/km CO2 figures for the various types of R4? I have the feeling that it's going to get harder/more expensive to use our cars, and it would be good to have the facts.
 
Calculating them and getting them accepted by the powers that be are two different things. These days the figures are obtained from accurate 5 stage WLTP tests which are carried out under rigorous supervision. These new tests giving widely different CO2 figures than the previous NEDC tests on exactly same car.
 
CO2 emissions are strictly related to how much fuel you're burning, so proportional to consumption.
And it's not very easy to define a medium consumption for an R4
 
A bit of basic chemisty:
Most of the mass of petrol consists of carbon atoms.
Some round figures: A liter of gasoline has a mass of roughly 700 g. roughly 80% of that is carbon, about 560 g.
An atom of carbon binds with oxygen to form CO2. 1 atom of carbon weighs 12 hours, an atom of oxygen 16 hours. (and there are two in CO2)
In short, with 12 g of carbon and 32 g of oxygen you make 48 g of CO2.
So with 560 g of carbon: 560 g x 48/12 = 2240 g CO2.
My first GTL on old petrol (without ethanol) did on average 23 km per liter so 2240 divided by 23 gives 97 g CO2 per km.
The GTL is the more economical with fuel consumption, slightly bigger engine and small (28mm) carburetor.
The other models have a small engine and bigger carburetor so more fuel consumption.

But after all that is way less than the more modern cars with "modern" bigger engines they produce more CO2 emmision and don't forget that by adding ethanol in fuel, fuel consumption rises and so more CO2 emissions per km.

But basicly I don't care about CO2 emmision. Last year on the German news there was an item that since the 1980 all German car brand manufactures made agreements about emmision, future emmision rates and how to interpret them so it would be salable to the governments and the masses, we call it cartel formation agreements. I didn't hear that news on the Dutch channels... it was kept quiet (censorship).
And don't think that electric cars are the solution, just let's calculate how much tera watts are needed just to keep all vehicles rolling, and I don't mention vessels, houses, factory's etc. etc. etc.

Clean solutions have been invented since the 70s and 80s, but all those techniques are kept silent, in the eyes of the oil sheiks the Bugatti veyron has to continue to drive and Dubai has to continue to grow.
 
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To be honest I'm not too bothered about fuel consumption and how much co2 my engine chucks out. As long as it passes it's emissions test each year, and performs well with its bigger carb, free-flow filter and straight-through exhaust, I couldn't give a monkey's :laughing:
 
Thanks Andy, nice article and I hope the numbers are correct because what I wrote is exclusively the CO2 that is released during incineration. However, this is only a fraction of the total amount of CO2 that produces gasoline as a product. According to well-to-wheel methodology, all CO2 that is generated during the tracing, production, refining, transporting and storage of petrol is attributed to the CO2 emissions of petrol. This can add up to about 30%, which means that the emission amounts to 3.1 kg CO2 per liter of petrol.
 
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