Historic vehicles: an overview from a transport policy perspective

ABSTRACT

Historic vehicles (HVs) are the heritage of road transport that have surprisingly received little attention in the academic literature. This study presents an overview of the literature on HVs, focusing on the three topics that dominate the policy debate on transport: environmental, safety and congestion impacts. We observed that polluting emissions of HVs are per kilometre much higher (often a factor 5 or more) than those of moderns vehicles. The annual average mileage per vehicle per year of HVs is much lower than other vehicles. The lower active and passive safety levels of HVs are compensated by the way these vehicles are driven, resulting in the risk factors per kilometre being roughly equal or lower than other vehicles. The contribution of HVs to congestion is negligible. However, the transport policy discourse is divided on the topic of HVs. More comprehensive and effective laws and regulation are needed to protect this aspect of the heritage of road transport whilst concurrently avoiding or limiting the problems caused by them.

KEYWORDS:

• Historic vehicles
• policy
• safety
• environment
• congestion
• noise

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Fédération Internationale des Véhicules Anciens (FIVA) for providing some of the data and documents used in this study. We also would like to acknowledge the contribution of Deirdre Casella, carefully and delicately edited the text and last but certainly not least the three anonymous reviewers who provided many constructive and useful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Yashar Araghi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3232-4942

Notes

1 Throughout this report we abbreviate historic vehicles as HVs and historic vehicle as HV.

2 Here we would like to emphasise that there is a clear difference between the problems and benefits of HVs that relate to the period of production, and the problems or benefits caused by the ageing effects of modern vehicles, used as a regular means of transport. The first problems and benefits relate to the specific characteristics of the vehicles, regardless of their age, such as design and technologies used (and implications for environmental pressure and safety). The second problems and benefits relate to the ageing of the vehicles. Zachariadis et al. (2001) and Faiz, Gautam, and Burki (1995) discuss that as the age of the modern vehicle increases their emissions also increase, which requires inspection and maintenance programmes put in place by individual countries.

3 These areas can be found at the official website affiliated to EU commission: urbanaccessregulations.eu.

4 The second author of this paper has three historic cars, and has been a member of the vintage air-cooled VW club Holland since 1983.

5 the data book reports data for all cars over 20 years together, no disaggregation by age class for these data is provided.

6 Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.

7 HC stands for hydrocarbons and refers to emissions from various unburned mixtures of hydrogen and carbon in fuel and rarely, oil.

8 NO_x vehicle emissions are a mixture of nitrogen monoxide (NO), which is not a risk for health, and nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), which is a health risk. Before the introduction of three way catalytic converters on new petrol cars (starting around 1987, with a share of 100% since 1993) the share of NO₂ in total NO_x emissions was relatively low (5–10%). Cars with a three-way catalytic converter have a share of NO₂ of up to 55%. We conclude that the difference in NO_x emission factors between historic petrol cars and modern cars is much larger than the difference in NO₂ factors. Consequently the decrease in the harmful NO₂ emissions is much less than the decrease in NO_x emissions (Hoen et al., 2012).

9 There is another issue about PM that we need to point out in here. Older diesel engine vehicles emit more PM than newer engines (Twigg, 2007), but modern vehicles have a higher share of ultra-small particulates (e.g. PM_2.5) in total PM emissions, and these particulates have a relatively more negative impact on human health than PM₁₀ (Gertler, Gillies, & Pierson, 2000).

10 Note that maintaining and restoring an HV also results in CO₂ emissions, which have not been included in the above discussions. To the best of our knowledge there is no literature on this topic.