GearCity Executive Secretary - A Report Utility for GearCity

[JC_Denton]

I wonder with 2nd Gear's emissions systems, you could figure out the pollution data.

I might have the formula I made to come up with GCEV values that I used to plug in real world pollutant values into...

That's exactly what the new tab attempts to do.

It uses the emissions value as a proxy for how much CH4 (methane) and N2O (nitrous oxide) are emitted, and combines that with the amount of CO2 emitted (based on the fuel economy and the type of fuel), and uses that to calculate the total greenhouse gas emissions (in tons of CO2-equivalent).

I'd have to look at my notes to determine exactly how I determined the conversion factors between the emissions rating and the amount of CH4 and N2O emitted.  I remember puzzling over it as well as the GCEV values for some time, but don't remember what I settled on.

The warming factors and CO2 per gallon of fuel burned are the real-world values, with an assumption of kerosene for steam cars.  That was somewhat illuminating; it made me rethink whether diesel really made any sense from a CO2 standpoint, since while it generally gives more miles per gallon, which at the surface level looks good, it also gives more CO2 per amount of fuel burned (as well as, more problematically from a city-air-quality standpoint, N2O).

There are other assumptions, notably that I didn't figure out the structure to the game's used car market, so I approximate the number of surviving cars from each model's yearly sales based on its dependability rating and age.  And it looks like miles driven per year is currently a fixed figure (9500 miles), whereas I had plans to make it gradually increase over time from the early years.

It's a feature I could take farther in several ways.  Currently it only shows prior-year emissions, not all of history.  There could be more detail of the cleanest or dirtiest cars.  I'd love to have an analysis of which fuel types are actually the best for the planet, across fleets (and that would be interesting to run on real-word data, too).  A pie-in-the-sky goal would be modeling the cumulative amount of planetary warming the historical automobile fleet had caused.  More realistic would be calculating emissions for electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles taking into account the carbon used to generate the electricity or hydrogen (based on historical regional data), whereas currently those are factored in as zero, based on only the tailpipe emissions.

Then there are other "fun" things that could be modeled, like tetaethyllead.  I don't know if there's a distinction between types of pollutants being modeled in game to that level, but that one would at least gradually decline in the late game.

Basically though, it's a fun statistical playground, not one of the areas that offers actionable game insight.