getluky.net

I’ve been agonizing lately over whether to get another, more environmentally friendly car. The conventional wisdom seems to be to just get a hybrid, but as i’ve unfortunately been blessed/cursed with the need to investigate things for myself, i’ve been sucked into a black hole of car research that isn’t really coming to any quantitative conclusions. There seems to be plenty of authoritative speech out there about the topic, but little actual research or good rollups of publicly available information…

One of the most interesting references is the EPA’s website. Recently while browsing, I realized that it’s not too hard to download the 2000-2006 emissions testing results! It’s pretty fascinating to me, because the results have both a pollutants test result AND a greenhouse gas emissions result. That kind of blew my mind, because some of the cars I looked at rated good for greenhouse gas emissions, but bad for pollutants emitted from the tailpipe.

The CA rating system sure did confuse me as well, too. LEV-II may actually be less emissions than ULEV-I, or at least that’s what I think for now… I will definitely look into that further.

Anyway, i’ve imported all the data into MySQL, and now i’ve got over 12000 test results covering 751 car models over the past 6 years. It’s a pretty awesome public data set, and I can’t wait to start normalizing it and producing some interesting graphs. If I can figure out how to avoid getting my server crushed, i’ll try to provide some dynamic data, and at the least, i’ll post a mysql dump of the data once I get it normalized.

So stay tuned! Also, please post a comment if you’re an automotive engineer / environmental engineer and can help me decipher some of the data if I get stuck. Thanks!

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 12th, 2006 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.