Old Cars

Paris has officially banned cars built before 1997 from entering the city during the daytime on weekdays, and could soon expand even further until only EVs are left within the city limits.

The average age of the 247 million cars and trucks on U.S. roads hit a record of 11.4 years in January, the latest figures available from state registration data gathered by the Polk research firm.

Air pollution in China's capital city is reaching sobering levels. The World Health Organization warns that levels for fine airborne particulates that pose the greatest health risks should go no higher than 25 for 24-hour exposure on the PM2.5 scale. On January 22, the official Beijing government reading near Tiananmen Square reached 258 at 4 a.m. The city rates it as "hea

Consumers are keeping their automobiles for longer periods than ever before, according to a study performed by the survey gurus at R. L. Polk & Co. For anyone keeping track of such things, this news comes as little surprise – average length of ownership has been steadily increasing at an average rate of 3.7 percent annually.

A vote could come today on a bill designed to offer credits of up to $4,500 for consumers to trade-in gas-guzzling older vehicles. The so-called "cash for clunkers" legislation is designed to stimulate auto sales, but it also stands to effectively remove gross polluters from the roads and put drivers in safer and more fuel efficient vehicles.

We knew it was coming. Right on schedule, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, Calif.) has introduced legislation to Congress that would pay drivers of older vehicles a predetermined sum to replace them with new or newer cars. Depending on the year of the vehicle being traded in, a voucher for up to $4,500 would be granted to the driver. This voucher could be used to purchase a car manufactured after 2004 that

Finding good uses for cars that can no longer drive is always good news. But it's even better when you can recycle old cars into infant incubators using a design from the engineers at Design that Matters. Approximately 3.9 million infants die every year in the developing world, and 1 out of 4 could be saved if they had access to incubators.

All of the clean new vehicles in the world won't amount to much if they don't replace the older, dirtier fleet of cars currently on the roads. For this reason, some U.S. states are beginning to offer programs which pay drivers to turn in their old clunkers for new, cleaner cars and trucks. In Texas, for instance, up to $3,500 is available to qualifying families which earn less than $63,000 per year in

Considering that the legacy left behind by American car companies has little to do with being clean, there seems to be an increased sense of urgency by some U.S. states to replace the older fleet of vehicles with newer, and therefore cleaner, vehicles. The states with the two largest vehicle fleets, Texas and California, have both implemented new programs which offer cash-based incentives to owners of

If you thought trading in your old gas-guzzling car or truck for a shiny new hybrid or subcompact would help the planet by taking it off the road for good, you'd better think again. Shipping those old road warriors south to Mexico is now a big business. According to the Los Angeles Times, the armada of Detroit iron flooding across the border is large enough to sustain 25,000 families via the used car trade in