Impacto de la legislación aplicable a la catalogación de vehículos históricos sobre el consumo de combustible y el impacto medioambiental del parque automovilístico español. Propuesta para una nueva legislación

Zusammenfassung

Currently the majority of the population of the European Union is concentrated in urban areas causing an increase of the displacements, which takes to the sector of the transport to be an important source generating emissions harmful to the environment. This situation is leading the competent Official Bodies to adopt increasingly hard measures against road traffic, focusing especially on older vehicles because they are those with a higher degree of pollution. In the beginnings of the automotive industry, it was experimented with different technologies and energy sources, opting for less autonomy and easier refueling, without foreseeing the negative repercussions that the environment had on the use of engines powered by products petroleum derivatives. It was not until the middle of the 20th century when smoke was ejected from the exhaust pipe of vehicles as one of the causes of air pollution existing in major cities. From that moment an infinite number of regulations is dictated to regulate and to diminish these harmful emissions, causing that each time they are made vehicles cleaner. Along with the development of the vehicles, a movement is born that wants to preserve for the present and future generations the vehicles that are being discontinued and obsolete, being necessary to regulate their situation in order to be able to combine their circulation with the environmental problems they cause. In Spain, in 1995, the Regulation of Historical Vehicles was born to order the existing void, although the time elapsed has revealed the shortcomings of this regulation and the disparity of criteria that exists in its application. This work makes a schematic tour of the various anti-pollution regulations that have been applied over the years, from the Geneva Agreement of 1958 to the current Euro 6 standard, to then study the pollutant emissions produced by vehicles in general and the history in particular, quantifying the fuel consumption and emissions to the atmosphere of twenty-three pollutants produced by the existing passenger car park in Spain in 2015. With the results obtained can be quantified the pollution produced by the passenger cars that are thirty or more years old. Once established the shortcomings presented by the current regulation of historic vehicles and estimated the pollutant emissions and fuel consumption of older passenger cars, it is evident the need to establish a new regulation to overcome the problems detected. This new regulation substantially improves the current Regulation of Historical Vehicles, simplifies the procedures for the registration and circulation of these vehicles and proposes a fundamental measure based on adapting its circulation to which most of them are now doing, not to exceed the 1.500 kilometers per year, thus reducing fuel consumption and pollutant emissions of the twenty-three agents studied until they can be compared globally to the data obtained for a Euro 6 passenger car. The only way for a historic vehicle to remain in perfect state of maintenance and operation is to circulate. Even though it has been determined that an old vehicle is polluting more for each kilometer traveled than a current one, this doctoral thesis demonstrates the hypothesis that the circulation of an old vehicle does not have to be more harmful to the environment than the current one if it is performed in an orderly manner, which is achieved with the appropriate legislation adapted to the specific circumstances of this type of vehicles