Don't kill cool cars because of climate change

Right. Let’s get the awkward bit out of the way first, because someone in the comments is already typing it.

Yes, I am a car weirdo. I have car aspergers. Yes, we’re about to argue that car people aren’t the problem. I’ll bring maths. Beautiful, inconvenient, ruins-the-dinner-party maths. So put the pitchfork down, pour something nice, and let’s actually look at the scoreboard because the received wisdom that enjoying a naturally-aspirated V12 on a Sunday is single-handedly boiling the oceans is, and I cannot stress this enough, complete nonsense.

Before I go too far, it’s worth noting that I’m a lefty wanker climate change worrier. I ran a blog for years about climate change. I spent 5 years advocating for the electrification of the Irish motoring fleet with the EV Association. I have young kids. It’s currently 30 fucking degrees at night. In Ireland. I care. But I also do not drink from the same fountain of knowledge that thinks it’s down to individuals alone, or that golf courses are robbing land from the common person. And I don’t even play golf!

Anyway, global greenhouse gas emissions in 2024 came in at roughly 53 gigatonnes of CO₂-equivalent. That’s 53 billion tonnes. Here’s how the pie gets sliced, and it’s not the slice you’ve been shouted at about yet:

• Power generation: the biggest single lump, about 29%. Keeping the lights on and the kettle boiling.
• Manufacturing and industry: cement, steel, chemicals, the stuff that literally builds the world — around 22%.
• Transport: all of it, every car, truck, ship, plane and train on Earth — about 16%, or 8.4 gigatonnes.

So before we’ve even mentioned a single exhaust note, two-thirds of the problem is power stations and factories. The entire transport sector and remember, that’s your Amazon vans, your 40-tonne artics, your cruise ships and your 747s is the third biggest emitter.

Road vehicles are three-quarters of it. And within road, the single biggest offender by a country mile is passenger cars, about 3.2 gigatonnes a year, and rising 20% over the last decade. That’s not the McLaren. That’s the school run. That’s the 2.1-tonne crossover doing 5km to the shops with one person in it, five days a week. And in Ireland the average car journey is less than 3km.

Ferrari built 13,752 cars in 2024. Lamborghini managed 10,687. Meanwhile the world cranks out somewhere north of 75 million cars a year. Ferrari’s output last year is roughly 0.018% of global production. Chuck in Lambo, McLaren, the lot, and you’re still deep in rounding-error territory. These cars are, statistically, a garnish. And most of them do about 2,000km a year before being tucked under a fitted cover in a temperature-controlled garage to appreciate in value. The average diesel Qashqai will out-emit every single Purosangue ever built in a single year.

The exotic isn’t the epidemic. The ordinary is the epidemic. There’s just an awful lot of ordinary.

If you want to move the needle on transport emissions, you don’t ban the 20 year old classic sports car that’s used once a month. You electrify the median. You get the 75-million-a-year river of Corollas, RAV4s, Golfs and Qashqai’s onto batteries. It’s not glamorous, nobody’s going to make a documentary about it, but shifting the everyday commuter fleet to EV is where the gigatonnes actually live. It’s what I spent years whinging to politicians about.

Doing that also frees the interesting cars to keep existing. Because once the 95% is electric and clean, the enthusiast 5% is a rounding error the climate can disregard. Let the engineers cook interesting technology with the thermal efficiency, the hybrid systems, the aero, the materials, the battery chemistry they love developing for its sports cars which trickles straight down into the cars that are interesting. They already do. Look at Porsche’s Taycan, Macan and Cayenne and how they’ve bled into the 911 (and vice-versa). Motorsport and the halo brands have always been the R&D lab. Kill the lab and you don’t save the planet; you just make everyone’s future hybrid Kia slightly worse.

Punish the scale, not the existence.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s fine to sell V12s by the million. It isn’t, and nobody sane is asking for that. Scale is the whole ballgame. The argument isn’t “combustion for everyone forever.” The argument is that a small number of exquisite, expensive, rarely-driven machines are a joy the planet can easily carry the way it carries private art collections and vintage watches and every other beautiful, non-essential thing humans make. And to be fair, when you drive a nice cool car around, so many people enjoy it. Not least the entertainment value of motorsports.

The V12 isn’t the villain. A billion V12s would be. There aren’t a billion. There are about ten thousand a year, and they mostly live in garages.

You’d think, listening to some people, that Formula 1 is out there personally deep-frying polar bears. So let’s look at what F1 actually says about itself, because they publish this stuff as part of their climate ambitions.

F1’s total carbon footprint for the 2024 season was 168,720 tonnes of CO₂e. Down about 26% since 2018. 168,720 tonnes sounds like a lot until you hold it up against that global figure of 53 billion. F1’s entire annual footprint is roughly 0.0003% of global emissions. You need a lot of zeroes to even find it.

When F1 breaks down where those emissions come from, the cars going around the track are about 1% of the total. One percent. The screaming, the racing, the actual sport a rounding error within a rounding error.

So where does it all go? Logistics and travel. Freight is about a third of it. Team and staff travel is another third or so. Factories and facilities, event operations — that’s the rest. The sport isn’t the emissions problem. Flying twenty containers of kit and a paddock full of people to twenty-four countries is the emissions problem.

Which is the most encouraging thing in this whole post because logistics is fixable. F1 is already at it: DHL’s biofuel trucks cut freight emissions on the European rounds by an average of 83%, they’re shoving freight off planes and onto ships, using sustainable aviation fuel, running events on hydrotreated vegetable oil and solar. You don’t have to make the cars slower or quieter to fix F1. You have to fix the courier bill. And they’re doing it.

Speaking of, global shipping emits about one billion tonnes of CO₂ a year. That’s roughly 3% of all global emissions, from an industry you never think about because it happens somewhere over the horizon.

One billion tonnes. Against F1’s 168,720.

Run that maths and F1’s entire season. Every car, every flight, every container, every catering tent produces about as much CO₂ as global shipping belches out in roughly ninety minutes. The actual on-track racing? Global shipping matches all of it in under a minute. You could delete the whole of Formula 1, forever, and the ships wouldn’t even notice the gap while they finished their coffee.

And that’s just ships. We haven’t even started on cement, or steel, or the fact that passenger cars (the boring ones doing 3km per journey) out-emit the entire F1 season roughly every half hour.

Climate change is real. It’s serious. I care about it. And the fixes are enormous, urgent and mostly extremely dull: clean up the power grid, decarbonise industry, electrify the ordinary car, sort out shipping and freight. Do those and you’ve bagged the overwhelming majority of the problem.

What you do not have to do, to save the world, is come for the 5,000 people a year who buy something wonderful and drive it on a Sunday. You don’t have to silence the grid of a race that’s a mathematical footnote.

Fix the big, boring levers. Fix them hard. And then leave a little joy in the world.

Go electrify your commuter. Then go listen to a V12. Both, at once, is allowed. That’s the whole point.