Question: What is your favourite car manufacturer?

Alan Winfield answered on 18 Mar 2011:

Well I try to be an ethical consumer (although it’s very hard). That means only buying stuff from companies that are themselves ethical in they way they manufacture their products or look after their workforce or care about the environment. My car is a VW, who came 4th equal in a survey of the top 10 ethical car brands in the Guardian, see here http://www.guardian.co.uk/cars/story/0,,1357774,00.html

I am trying to practice what’s called ‘Bangernomics’. It means getting a well built car and then looking after it really really well and keeping it for as long as you can. My VW is now 6 years old and I expect to keep it another 10 years or so. If they are well maintained modern cars can easily last for 250,000 miles. Of course this means that I’m not a good consumer. The car manufacturers would like us all to change our cars every 3 years or so, but I think that’s environmentally unsustainable. The problem is that most of the energy costs of a car are in manufacturing it, then in scrapping it. So one way to make our lifestyle a little more sustainable is to keep cars (with low carbon emission engines) for much longer.