Hold your breath (yes, thanks to the smog!)according to the auto trade journal Ward's, there are now over one billion cars, light-, medium-, and heavy-duty trucks on roads around the world, up from 980 million at the end of 2009.
The U.S. is still has the biggest population of cars and trucks -- one for every 1.3 people in the country. But the American fleet is not growing much, only about 1 percent a year. The explosion in automobile deployments is coming from China, where registrations grew by 27.5 percent, bringing the country's vehicle population to 78 million.
That increase was more than half of the total global expansion, according to Ward'. India's vehicle population underwent the second-largest growth rate, up 8.9 percent to 20.8 million units, compared with 19.1 million in 2009.
According to the International Transport Forum the global vehicle fleet could reach 2.5 billion by 2050. No doubt those cars and trucks will be much more efficient than today's vehicles, especially with China and America setting tighter fuel standards. And many of them will be electric-drive vehicles. But another doubling of the global market -- even with an increase in efficiency -- means massive increases in greenhouse-gas emissions.
Good for auto industyr, not so for the planet!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment