not all old cars are "bangers" like the BBC want us to believe

Apart from putting out more emissions. The ordinary car standard's improved quite a lot in 16 years.

"Duncan Wood" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

A 9000 of that age will have the Trionic 5 engine management, one of the most sophisticated of it's era and only mildly upgraded until very recently. Even now, very few cars of any type sense knock on all four cylinders individually, let alone through measuring spark ionisation through the changes in resistances as the plug fires.

Which is nice but it wasn't tuned to massively exceed then current emissions standards so it probably barely passed Euro 2 when it was made & it's unlikely to manage even Euro 1 now.

You can disagree all you like. It won't alter the fact that it won't even remotely meet the emission requirements mandated for similar sized vehicle currently sold new in the EU.

So have a number of cars from that era. They too fail to meet emission standards of Euro 2, let alone 3 or 4.

It's the small changes to the mechanicals, the control strategy and calibration that makes *all* the difference.

Bollocks!

Just go with the sheep!

Here are the MOT emission results for my 1993 Saab 9000 carried out on 3 March

LIMIT ACTUAL VALUE FOR MY CAR

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Not bad eh! See!

What that you don't get charged every year to see if a car can achieve it's manufactured emissions spec?

And?

The numbers above speaks for themselves. The car is NOT a gross polluter when compared with a similar type and size of modern car.

Scrapping the car on the basis of PASSING the emission test with flying colours would be foolhardy and a waste of useful resources. In fact I hesitate by not describing the car as 'modern', having tried some modern cars but found them fiddly to drive, being noisy and wandering all over the road.

Sadly, all cars pollute to some degree, I know that. Unless you spend a fortune on the bleeding edge technology.

Which numbers? The MOT pass limits are orders of magnitude larger than a modern cars emissions. What makes you belive they're at all relevant?

They're obviously relevant. Otherwise why are they included in the MOT?

To see if the cars suffered a major failure, the limits haven't changed in the last 20 years, the emissions from modern cars have and they're measured under load, which would be rather impractical for an MOT station.

What are the Euro IV limits on emissions? Do the criteria include the above categories?

Kostas

They're in grams per km, so not directly comparable, as they're measured under load. All the MOT numbers tell you is that your running roughly the right mixture & your cats not completely dead.

This is all getting very nebulous. So if my car has excellent MOT emission figures, in your opinion it should be scrapped? Need some concrete evidence.

Petrol fuel has got a lot cleaner with less sulphur. You can see the effect on the exhaust systems, they now last a lot longer.

I didn't say that, I said that relative to a modern car it's a gross polluter. The MOT is a very inaccurate test of emissions that's designed to remove blatantly faulty cars.

On what basis? You have only given some nebulous evidence. I have provided the MOT emission test results for the car.

Which tell you that it's not much much worse than new and nothing else. It was at best built to conform to Euro 1, the current standards Euro IV. Which bit of the standards now being a lot tighter is confusing or "nebulous"?

But you don't know that the car was built to only conform to Euro 1. Saabs were fitted with CATs already from 1990, long before they became mandatory. The cars were designed for the US market which had emission standards from earlier on.

As where many other cars, but meeting higher specs cost money & compromises performance, so nobody did it until they had to or could see a marketing benefit. If you're really bored you can extract the numbers but there's no way the car still achieves the original ones or ever conformed to the current ones.

Just as an aside, I work on a 2002 Ford Excursion occasionally. Stretch limo, 6.7 litre V10, done 125,000 miles of mainly stop start town work. Averages 7 mpg. Every year at the MOT the tester is always astounded at just low clean the exhaust emissions are from it. The CO reading has never been high enough for the machine to actually measure it, always just 0.00 and the HC reading last year was 2. Idle test comes out as 0.00.

Of course, if you try to explain this to an Eco-Warrior they'll try and move the goal posts. Truth is, they don't like cars.