Are motorcycles really better for the environment than cars? MythBusters' Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage will reveal the answer tonight on the show’s season premier, which airs on the Discovery Channel at 9 p.m. The episode is unusual in that nothing blows up; it also marks the first airing of a MythBusters experiment that produced publishable scientific results.
“This actually is some of the most complicated data we’ve ever crunched on the show,” Savage said during a panel discussion at Comic Con 2011 in San Diego.
To ensure their findings were scientifically valid, the MythBusters crew teamed up with vehicle emissions expert Kent Johnson of the University of California, Riverside (UCR) to analyze a full range of pollutants: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbon and nitric oxides. In the three-day experiment, they tested three pairs of motorcycles and cars from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.
To get real-word results, they collected emissions while operating the vehicles on streets and freeways rather than in a smog testing station. That’s where Johnson's expertise came in. For the past 10 years Johnson has been the lead design engineer responsible for the development of the Mobile Emissions Laboratory at UCR’s Center for Environmental Research and Technology, which is a U.S. leader in advancing the science of vehicle emissions testing.
Yesterday I caught Johnson at his lab in Riverside to ask about the project’s scientific chops:
DNews: What was scientifically significant about this MythBusters experiment?
Johnson: It’s the first ever quantification of a true comparison between a car and a motorcycle, driven over identical conditions, using a portable measurement system. And this comparison was done for three decades of technology.
DNews: So many scientists would love to be on MythBusters. How did you get this gig?
Johnson: MythBusters was looking for someone to help them quantify emissions. They went to UC Berkeley first. They don’t really do that kind of thing, but they knew UC Riverside did. They contacted the director [of the Center for Environmental Research and Technology], and he sent them to me because that’s what I do.
DNews: Did your involvement in the project change the MythBusters' original plan?
Johnson: The original plan was to go to a smog station and do video shooting there. We said no, you need to do on-freeway and in-neighborhood portable measurements. Portable emissions monitoring systems, or PEMS, were recently developed, in 2005, as part of a larger effort on the part of regulatory agencies to understand real-world emissions. It just so happened that the show came to us at the perfect time. If they had come eight years ago, it couldn’t have happened this way.
DNews: Did the experiment reveal any trends regarding vehicle-generated air pollution over the past three decades?
Johnson: The automobile emissions continued to reduce while the motorcycle emissions stayed the same. We knew this in the scientific community, but we had never made the measurements in the real world. Cars are so clean nowadays that the contributing sources to air pollution are mostly the heavy-duty diesel industry and restaurant cooking. We’ve actually measured emissions from cooking hamburgers.
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DNews: So, which vehicles turned out to be greener, the motorcycles or the cars?
Johnson: You can watch the show to find out. But I will tell you this: Our best guess was off by a factor of three. That’s why these data could contribute to science. Researchers could be adjusting their inventory models to reflect the true differences between motorcycles and cars, and it would probably identify that additional regulatory measures may be necessary to maintain air quality standards in certain districts, depending on the number of motorcycles versus cars.
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IMAGES:
UC Riverside researcher Kent Johnson stands between Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, two of the hosts of MythBusters. Courtesy MythBusters
Johnson poses with the big-rig emissions testing equipment in his lab at UCR's Center for Environmental Research and Technology. Sarah Simpson
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