A 2008 Toyota Prius no doubt causes less ecological harm than a 1965 Toyota Corona; and a 2008 Ford Taurus is no doubt far safer than a 1965 Ford Mustang. Still, the shadow effects of today’s safer and cleaner automobiles are growing as the numbers of these vehicles rise across the globe. A company like Toyota is now a model of how to produce large outputs with just-in-time efficiency, less waste, and high quality controls. It’s at the forefront of research in environmental technologies, too. But Toyota’s ultimate goal is not just to expand sales, capture markets, and increase profits—or to be a pioneer in eco-friendly automotive engineering—but also to garner the prestige of surpassing General Motors as the world’s number one automaker.
This global competition to produce more has put well over 800 million cars and commercial vehicles on today’s roads—up almost twelvefold from 70 million in 1950. With automakers marketing sport-utility vehicles and other light trucks as passenger cars, many of the newer auto-mobiles are big and heavy (thus more dangerous for ecosystems and pedestrians). Quickly rising sales in the Third World means this region accounts for an increasing share of the global vehicle fleet, as firms like GM, Ford, and Toyota rush into booming markets like China.
Driving these cleaner automobiles uses up 15 percent of the world’s energy output and generates one-fifth of the world’s energy-related carbon dioxide emissions every year. Junking used vehicles for new models also adds to the global ecological burden, especially in developing countries without effective recycling facilities. Meanwhile, traffic collisions of these safer automobiles now kill more than 3,000 people and injure 137,000 every day. Even with all of the advances in safety over the last half century, the chances of dying in a traffic “accident” remain significant in the First World. Yet the shadow effects of the expanding auto industry are far greater in developing countries, where traffic laws and infrastructure are inadequate. Already, 85 percent of traffic deaths now occur in these countries, with children facing particularly high risks. And the death toll rises every year, even as it falls in the First World.
The number of passenger cars and commercial vehicles registered world-wide has been rising steadily over the last five decades, from 127 million in 1960, to 246 million in 1970, to 411 million in 1980, to 583 million in 1990, to 735 million in 2000, to more than 825 million today.1 The global auto industry is now producing around 67 million light vehicles— passenger cars, station wagons, and light commercial vehicles under 6 metric tons (13,200 pounds)—each year, an increase of 10 million or so from 2000. Although millions of vehicles are junked or recycled each year, industry analysts predict the overall number of vehicles will continue to grow rapidly, with somewhere between 2 and 3.5 billion light vehicles on the world’s roads by the middle of this century.2
Toyota’s growth has been especially impressive since 2000, accounting for half of the total increase in global production. Several years ago, the chairman of the board, Hiroshi Okuda, set a corporate target of capturing 10 percent of the world market—to enter what he called the “Global Ten.” After achieving this, he set a new target of 15 percent of the global market to overtake General Motors as the world’s top producer. In 2006 alone, Toyota’s global production surged another 10 percent to more than 9 million vehicles, putting GM just 162,000 ahead. Despite increasing sales by 3 percent, GM was only 3000 ahead in 2007, with Toyota on track to become global sales leader in 2008 or 2009, a position GM has held since 1931.
Toyota’s success stems in large part from a corporate culture of always striving for greater efficiency, better quality controls, less waste, steady production increases, and ultimately a lower sticker price for a more reliable vehicle. The Toyota Production System—made famous in the book The Machine That Changed the World3—aims to continually improve the manufacturing process by bringing parts together “just-in-time,” thus eliminating inefficiencies, as well as concentrating on consistent high quality, such as allowing workers to halt the production line if they spot something amiss.
Toyota’s system uses fewer natural resources and generates less waste per unit produced. Auto firms in other countries adopted many of Toyota’s manufacturing strategies, and “in the process American and European cars went from being unreliable, with irritating breakdowns, leaks and bits dropping off in the 1970s, to the sturdy, reliable models consumers take for granted today.”4
Toyota remains highly efficient and has recently emerged as a leader in innovative environmental technologies such as hybrid cars like the Prius, which combines a conventional gas engine and an electric motor to maintain power on the open road. During start-up, idling, or slow traffic, it relies only on the electric motor (which itself emits no green-house gases). As a result, the Prius achieves over 61 miles per gallon in city driving and over 57 miles per gallon on the open road. It uses half as much gasoline as a comparable new American car, emitting half as much carbon dioxide, and some 90 percent less nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons.5
Although the Prius is a notable advance, at the heart of what Toyota employees call the “Toyota Way” is expansion—the drive to manufacture and sell more, and thus to win the game of being number one in terms of vehicles sold globally. The growth in the number of plants makes this clear. Toyota had 11 manufacturing plants in 9 countries in 1980; ten years later, it had grown to 20 in 14 countries. By 2005, it had expanded to 46 manufacturing plants in 26 countries, with design and engineering facilities in the United States, France, Belgium, and Thailand. Like all of the top automakers, Toyota markets its cars and trucks with sophisticated advertising campaigns. It develops new models with clockwork regularity, rushing to fill market gaps or compete with rivals. There are, for example, more than 60 models in Japan alone, with many more designed specifically for overseas markets.6
The sales success of SUVs, minivans, and other light trucks made by Toyota, General Motors, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler in large part explains the growth in auto production since the 1990s. SUVs and other light trucks constitute a growing share of total purchases and, if the current trend continues, they will account for half of the world’s passenger vehicles by 2030.7 Not only do SUVs use more fuel per mile traveled, but also take up more space than standard passenger cars, further congesting cities like Los Angeles, where roads and parking already account for two-thirds of all urban land space. Partly because of the increase in these larger, heavier vehicles, the average weight of a standard passenger vehicle in the United States, having fallen during the 1970s and 1980s, began to rise again in the 1990s, reversing many of the earlier gains in fuel efficiency from lowering vehicle weights.8
Over the last century, then, the automobile became integral to the economies—some even argue to the cultures—of Japan, Europe, and the United States. This century’s frontier for the global auto industry is the developing world.
Paving Developing Countries with Autos
GM, Toyota, Ford, Volkswagen, Nissan, BMW, Honda, and Hyundai-Kia are now aggressively expanding markets in developing countries. Some of the sales are First World discards. Japan, for example, exported around 1 million used motor vehicles in 2003—worth about $2.7 billion.9 But most of the sales to the Third World are new cars.
A glance into China reveals the potential for big auto sales. At the end of the 1990s, there were fewer than 10 vehicles per 1,000 people (compared to 780 per 1,000 in the United States). The total number of cars has been rising steadily since 2000—by 4 million, for example, in 2003, with over 400,000 vehicles added to Beijing’s roads alone (nearly a 25 percent increase in Beijing). The International Energy Agency now predicts the period 2005-2030 will see a sevenfold increase across China, to 270 million cars and trucks. Not surprisingly, all of the major automakers are now jockeying for position in this exploding market. GM, for example, now operates seven joint ventures and two wholly owned enterprises in China. It sold over 665,000 vehicles in 2005, an increase of 35 percent from the previous year (now accounting for just over 11 percent of market share). Since 2001, China as a whole has swept past Canada, France, Germany, South Korea, and Spain to become the third-largest motor vehicle producer (after the United States and Japan).10
The future, then, will certainly see the total number of motor vehicles continue to rise. This globalization of automobile consumption is already damaging the global environment and putting millions of people—especially the world’s poorest—at risk. A quick statistical overview confirms this. Over recent decades, automobiles have accounted for almost half of all the oil and rubber, a quarter of all the glass, and 15 percent of all the steel consumed each year across the globe. Passenger cars alone currently account for about 15 percent of global energy use. To this must be added the energy required for constructing and maintaining roads for these cars. The roads in turn disrupt natural hydrologic cycles, which can cause flooding and reduce groundwater supplies.11
Automobiles are also emitting carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide, and particulates into the air, contributing to smog, acid rain, and climate change. Smog—a word coined from smoke and fog in 1905—is now less severe than a few decades ago in some cities like Los Angeles. But it remains a serious and growing environmental and health problem in many cities, especially in the developing world, where trans-port often accounts for between 70 and 80 percent of local air pollution. Globally, outdoor air pollution kills over 24,000 children every year. Even wealthy places continue to struggle with controlling outdoor air pollution. In Canada, for example, a 2005 study by the Ontario Medical Association estimates that over 5,000 people die prematurely because of air pollution—a figure the association predicts will increase to over 10,000 people by 2026.12
Motor vehicles are one of the biggest causes of climate change, and the impacts have been steadily increasing as the volume of traffic grows. The national impact of automobiles on global carbon dioxide emissions naturally varies across jurisdictions. Personal consumption in a place like Canada accounts for more than a quarter of the country’s total green-house gas emissions; of these, passenger road transportation accounts for half, with private vehicles by far the most significant emitters.
Globally, motor vehicles now account for about one-fifth of total energy-related carbon dioxide emissions (and some three-quarters of total emissions from transportation). Even in the United States, with great strides in the environmental performance of vehicles, transportation continues to account for one-third of total carbon dioxide emissions.13 Some of the technological devices to produce “cleaner” automobiles are having unexpected ecological consequences. For example, catalytic converters, which, as noted in chapter 4, effectively reduce many smog-producing emissions, produce nitrous oxide (also known as “laughing gas”) as a by-product. Nitrous oxide now accounts for over 5 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases: about 15 percent arises from cars and trucks with catalytic converters (other major sources include manure and fertilizers). Catalytic converters also emit heavy metals (rhodium, palladium, and platinum), with unknown health consequences.14
SUVs and other light trucks are especially hard on the environment. An average SUV in North America traveling 12,000 miles (20,000 kilo-meters) per year emits half again as much carbon dioxide—some 6 instead of 4 metric tons—as an average mid-sized sedan. Many countries, including the United States, do not impose the same environmental restrictions on SUVs and other light trucks as on cars, with the result that, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, an average truck sold in the United States emits “2.4 times more smog-forming pollution and 1.4 times more global warming gases than the average” car.15
Nor does the ecological impact of such trucks end with greater emissions. They are scarring deserts and stirring up vast amounts of dust—a phenomenon geographer Andrew Goudie has labeled “Toyota-ization” because so many of the four-wheel-drive vehicles in places like North Africa are Toyota Land Cruisers. Toyota-ization combines with deforestation and desertification to generate more frequent and intense dust storms. Professor Goudie’s analysis of satellite images in Saharan Africa, for example, shows a tenfold increase in dust storms over the last half century. This has resulted in as much as 3 billion metric tons of dust blowing into the atmosphere every year, enough, Goudie calculates, to disrupt climate patterns and destroy coral reefs.16
Junking the increasing number of old cars and trucks creates many environmental problems as well. The capacity to recycle old vehicles in wealthy places like Japan, western Europe, and North America has been, as the last chapter documented, steadily rising (and should continue to do so over the next decade). This is not the case, however, in most of the developing world. Vehicle recycling, for example, hardly occurs in the poor countries of Africa. National legislation to require more recycling of vehicles can also shift the burden of disposal to countries without effective recycling capabilities (for example, dumping old German cars in eastern Europe or old Japanese cars in Southeast Asia).17
Even comparatively wealthy developing countries like China are just beginning to develop a recycling infrastructure. The number of vehicles in use in China now exceeds 50 million, with more than 2 million vehicles being junked every year. At current rates of growth, this number will rise to over 3 million by 2010. Although China passed a law regulating the disposal and recycling of vehicles in 2001, according to the Chinese government, 90 percent of vehicles reaching “end-of-life” status—vehicles that are unsafe and highly polluting—remained illegally in use as of 2004.18
The increase in global traffic is killing more than just natural environments: it’s also killing increasing numbers of drivers, passengers, and pedestrians in countries with poor infrastructure and inadequate safety rules. Many newer vehicles, as documented in chapter 4, are safer for drivers and passengers (especially in terms of crash tests). But some, such as SUVs, are more dangerous for occupants in other cars and far more dangerous for pedestrians. The height of the front end of many SUVs, for example, means they are over two times more likely than a standard passenger vehicle to kill or severely injure a pedestrian in a collision.19
Despite safer conditions for people in most developed countries, the total number of traffic deaths and injuries each year continues to climb. At least 30 million people have died in traffic collisions over the last century. Given the uncertainties of global data, the actual number could be two to three times higher. Today, traffic collisions injure between 20 and 50 million and kill almost 1.2 million every year (about one-third of these deaths are pedestrians). The WHO and World Bank predict that annual traffic deaths will exceed 2 million by 2020.20
An average person, even living in a developed country, still has a roughly 1 percent lifetime chance of dying in a traffic collision.21 Not surprisingly, the risk rates vary somewhat across developed countries. In the United States, for example, the National Safety Council estimates the lifetime odds of dying in a motor vehicle collision at 1 in 84, or 1.2 percent.22 Yet the dangers are far greater in developing countries. Today, of the total number of traffic deaths globally, 85 percent are in low-and middle-income countries. Death rates in developing countries are rising, even as rates are falling in developed states. Traffic fatalities per 10,000 people jumped from 1975 to 1998 by more than 44 percent in Malaysia, by more than 79 percent in India, by just over 237 percent in Colombia, by 243 percent in mainland China, and by nearly 384 percent in Botswana.23
Children in the developing world are especially at risk. Six times more children per 100,000 people die in traffic collisions in low- than in high-income countries. Indeed, poorer countries account for 96 percent of all children killed in traffic collisions. Pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists account for many of the deaths in low-income countries, with fast speeds, wild road rules, and few safety features (even fairly simple ones like helmets) combining to create great hazards. Public transportation, too, is often very dangerous, as the colloquial terms for buses in Lagos, Nigeria suggest: danfo (flying coffins) and molue (moving morgues). The resulting burden on medical systems is high, with between 30 and 86 percent of all trauma admissions in low- and middle-income countries now related to traffic injuries.24 Meanwhile, governments and automakers continue to dismiss such tragedies with empty assurances that these “accidents” will become a thing of the past with the globalization of better cars, roads, and laws—even as the yearly toll in traffic deaths climbs relentlessly toward 2 million.