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Green car target "unlikely to be met"

The Rudd Government's Green Car Innovation Fund, grants worth $500 million will be offered to car manufacturers

Unless they conduct major overhauls of their existing models, Australian carmakers will have difficulty meeting Industry Minister Kim Carr's target. NRMA motoring research manager Jack Haley said while there were a range of existing technologies that could be adopted to ensure conventional cars used less petrol, implementing them could take years.

Mr Haley said viable options for improving efficiency included shifting from single-cam to twin cam engines and multi-speed transmissions — that is, increasing the number of gears in a gearbox.

Further down the track, other innovations, such as reducing the weight of vehicles through greater use of aluminium or composite plastics, would also boost fuel efficiency, Mr Haley said.

“If you really get serious you can achieve quite significant savings by taking weight out of the vehicle,” Mr Haley said.

However, while those measures would almost certainly result in a net 20 per cent increase in efficiency, he said it was unlikely car manufacturers would be able to implement the changes by 2010.

“It takes essentially two or three years to get a car on the market starting from scratch,” he said. “It would take rapid manufacturing changes to develop that ability.”

Under the Rudd Government's Green Car Innovation Fund, grants worth $500 million will be offered to car manufacturers to help accelerate the introduction of fuel-saving technologies. However, the car makers will be required to spend $3 for every $1 received from the fund.

On paper, Australian cars have failed to make any major gains in fuel efficiency over the past few decades.


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In 1980, the Ford Falcon achieved a fuel consumption rate of 11.7 litres per 100km, compared to 9.4 litres per 100km in 1999-2000.

Holden's Commodore had a consumption of 12 litres per 100km in 1980, compared to 10.9 litres per 100km in 2008.

But Mr Haley said the figures were somewhat misleading as, while fuel consumption figures had remained more or less constant, the power of the engines had increased significantly, decreasing their relative fuel economy.