About Miranda
The car being used for the Morris Minor Owners Club fundraising in 2023 is a 1963 Morris Minor 2 door saloon in Trafalgar Blue. It was donated to the club for fundraising by its owner Ruth Smith after being laid up since the Covid epidemic and in need of some structural repairs. Club member Brian Wood recommissioned the car and it was on display at the Classic Motor Show at the National Exhibition Centre while we worked out what we’d do with it. There’s lots more info about Miranda here
Marie Curie
Marie Curie’s origins are linked to the Marie Curie Hospital , at 2 Fitzjohn’s Avenue, Hampstead. This pioneering hospital, opened in 1930 by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, specialised in the “radiological treatment of women suffering from cancer and allied diseases”. It was staffed by medical women, and cared for 700 patients a year in 39 beds, with facilities for radium and x-ray therapy, and modern pathological and research laboratories.Visit the Marie Curie website here
Morris Minor Owners Club
Formed in 1976 , the Morris Minor Owners Club is the largest club in the world dedicated to the preservation and enjoyment of the post-war Morris Minor, produced from 1948 until 1971. With a small team of staff at our headquarters in Derby coupled with a dedicated team of volunteer committee members the club provides services to more than seven thousand members across the UK and around the world, With a network of branches around the country, an award winning bi-monthly magazine, dedicated spares support, and club merchandise, the MMOC caters for owners and enthusiasts of the best small car in the world. Visit the MMOC website here
The club and Marie Curie
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To have any genuine validity, any calculations about the environmental footprint of a vehicle need to be ‘whole of life’ calculations, i,e, from the cradle to the grave. It makes sense that a car’s annual carbon footprint is 1/l*tc+ac, where l= lifespan (total number of years predicted use), tc= total carbon involved in manufacture, and ac= the amount of carbon produced by the vehicle during its use in a year.
But just working out the tc is a hugely complex calculation and there are as many figures as there are people defining them. A rough rule of thumb is that a small (Toyota Aygo size) car has a footprint when rolling off the line of around 7 tonnes, while a top spec 4×4 (Land Rover DIscovery size) is up to 35 tonnes. Modern cars are less prone to the tinworm which consigned cars built last century to an early grave, and should have a lifespan of perhaps 15 years. To keep the calculation fair, we’ll enter the same mileage that the average classic car owner does in his car per year according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research report, of 1,200 miles. My modern Volvo XC90 turns out 340kg of carbon to do that distance, but let’s be generous and use the much smaller Toyota Aygo as mentioned above, which generates a slightly more reasonable 230kg. By comparison, the classic car churns out 560kg, more than twice as much. But, using the formula above, we have to add 1/15th (1 year from a 15 year lifespan) of 7 tonnes ‘creation footprint’ which equals 466kg to the Aygo figure, to get a total of almost 700kg. Since it was built at least thirty years ago, sometimes much more than that, the classic vehicle has long ago paid off its carbon debt, making it comfortably less polluting overall than even a clean supermini.
Our former Prime Minister Disraeli had something to say about statistics, but it’s fair to say that there is room for debate about classic cars, and that’s before you consider the huge amounts of money generated annually by the classic industry. If you fancy reading (much) more informed data on the subject, you can download the CEBR report free here and while away an hour or two, or start a conversation on the MMOC Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/morrisminors where we’ll be glad to chew the cud with you.
All of that said, Miranda will be travelling around the country this year promoting the Morris Minor Owners Club and more importantly Marie Curie, and in recognition of that, the club has contracted with carbon ofset organisation Tree-V to offset all the journeys the car undertakes. The club is also offering owners the chance to offset their own individual vehicles mileage when booking into our 75th anniversary National Rally this summer at Chateau Impney.
Going forward, the Morris Minor Owners Club commits to giving consideration to managing and lowering our carbon footprint and ensuring that we support green initiatives in the classic car movement as a whole.
