When it comes to buying our vehicles we spend a lot of time worrying about things like gas mileage, how much cargo space we have, or how much horsepower is under the hood; but how many of us question how toxic our cars are?
For researchers at the Ecology Center though this is an important question as they look at some of the top selling vehicles on the road to find an answer. After looking at over 200 vehicles from 2011 and 2012 researchers found some pretty alarming levels of hundreds of chemicals by using an x-ray fluorescence analyzer.
The test included scans of seats, dashboard, carpets, headliner, and door trims by weighting the samples by the size of the component and how much contact a person would have to have with it, which was then rated on a scale of 0 to 5. A score of 1 would indicate that the researchers couldn’t detect the chemicals they were testing for and a rating of 5 would indicate that they found high levels of the chemical being tested for and that people would come into frequent contact with.
The biggest offender, Ecology Center found, was the 2011 Mitsubishi Outlander Sport, with a score of 3.17. On the other end of the scale, the cleanest vehicle was the 2012 Honda Civic with a score of .46.
Honda earned a low toxicity score by not using bromine-based flame retardants in all interior components, using PVC-free interior fabrics and trim, and low levels of heavy metals and other metal allergens. However, Ecology Center researchers found bromine and antimony-based flame retardants in seat materials, the center console, and seat base of the Mitsubishi Outlander Sport. Mitsubishi also uses chromium treated leather on several components and over 400 parts per million (ppm) lead in seating materials in the Outlander Sport, according to Ecology Center.
via CNET
On the plus side researchers said that the use of PVC is declining from when they first started reporting in 2006 where none of the cars were PVC free until today when they found that 17 percent of the vehicles tested didn’t use PVC in their interiors.
Here is a chart of the 10 Worst and 10 Best cars when it comes tho their chemical testing.
