The Cost of Air-Conditioned Driving Goes Up

To most motorists, global warming is an issue for scientists or bureaucrats to worry about. Because of it, however, the act of turning on an automobile air-conditioning system is soon going to get more expensive.

Owners of older cars may be forced to sweat it out until the next Ice Age.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has imposed rules that will effectively prevent individuals from servicing their own air-conditioning systems and will require service garages to use expensive substitutes for CFC-12, the universal refrigerant in auto cooling systems.

Nearly 15% of all motorists service their own air-conditioning systems by adding CFC-12. To be sure, it is trickier than changing oil, but it can be a real money saver.

The CFC-12 injected into the cooling system is a chlorofluorocarbon, the family of gases that is depleting the Earth’s protective ozone layer. A recent EPA study projected that ozone is disappearing twice as fast as previously thought and that 200,000 Americans will die of skin cancer over the next 50 years.

As a result of such grim forecasts, the South Coast Air Quality Management District passed a regulation on March 1 that will bar the sale of small cans of CFC-12, effective at the end of this year.

The idea, says AQMD spokesman Bill Kelly, is to stop motorists from servicing their own air-conditioning systems and stop garages from offering the service. The agency estimates that 13.9 million pounds of CFCs are emitted in the Los Angeles region annually.

Moreover, the service stations that repair auto cooling systems will have to use recycling equipment that costs $3,000 to $10,000 to prevent the escape of CFC-12, says Hoyt Wilder, president of IG-LO Inc., the largest marketer of CFC-12.

All these costs are going to be passed on to the motorist. Under the federal and local regulations, garages will be required to fix leaky systems. So, motorists no longer can simply top off leaky systems without making repairs. That promises to make keeping cool a much more expensive proposition by next year.

And the luxury of keeping cool is just going to get more expensive.

The EPA has mandated that within five years all new car cooling systems must operate on substitute refrigerants. That substitute, called Suva, is an environmentally safer chemical.

But Suva will cost four to five times as much as CFC-12, Wilder says. A 30-pound tank of Suva will cost a garage up to $1,000; many will be unable to afford to keep it on hand.

The ultimate bogey will be if regulators decide to require Suva in existing cooling systems. In five years, new cars will use Suva, but that will leave an estimated 80 million older cars on the road using CFC-12.

The problem is you can’t use Suva in a system designed for CFC-12 without some modifications. Nobody is sure how much these modifications will be, but they promise to be costly. A middle ground may be possible, in which a Suva blend is used that would require less extensive modifications.

Junkyards may be required to collect CFC-12 out of junked cars and dispose of it, instead of setting out cars to slowly leak gases to the environment.

So remember that this is the last year when you can roll up your windows and turn on the air-conditioning system for not a whole lot of money.