TORONTO -- The federal government needs to establish a national fuel standard to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, senior auto industry executives said yesterday.
In order to gain maximum benefit from new technologies designed to improve fuel economy and reduce emissions, gasoline and diesel fuels need to be improved, the officials said.
"We need a clean diesel fuel in Canada," said Lindsay Duffield, president of BMW Canada Inc., whose company will start selling diesel vehicles in Canada next year and is considering bringing in a diesel version of its Mini that now sells in Europe.
Gasoline in Canada needs more detergents and no metal additives, Jim Miller, senior vice-president of Honda Canada Inc., said yesterday after a conference sponsored by The Globe and Mail and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
"The environment has become the new competitive battleground in the industry," maintained Stephen Beatty, managing director of Toyota Canada Inc.
Auto makers are regulated and subject to new environmental provisions in the most recent federal budget, but the industry on its own "cannot bear the sole burden of the initiative," said Bill Osborne, president of Ford Motor Co. of Canada Ltd.
The oil industry is moving on fuel, responded Tony Macerello, vice-president of public and government affairs for the Canadian Petroleum Producers Institute in Ottawa.
A move to reduce sulphur in diesel fuel to 15 parts per million from 500 by last October cost refiners about $5-billion, Mr. Macerello said.
That move has helped, said DaimlerChrysler Canada Inc. president Reid Bigland. But refiners need to make more ethanol available, he added. About 25 per cent of Chrysler's fleet is capable of running on an 85-per-cent ethanol blend known as E85, but just a handful of gas stations sell it in Canada.
"I feel like I'm selling the high-definition TV and there's no high-definition signal," he said in an interview yesterday after a presentation to the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto.
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