The Vice-President of the Ghana Automobile Association, Kojo Anobil, has bemoaned the lack of a regulation or guidelines to regulate the country’s automobile industry.
According to him, the industry has freely been left to operate on its own much to the extent that the industry players are now importing diesel engines without turbo into the country.
The situation, he argues, is impacting negatively on the ozone layer because of the high emissions those engines emit into the atmosphere.
“Unfortunately, the automobile industry does not have a regulatory body so anybody brings all sort vehicles into the country without being checked. What we should be doing is to sit down with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA) to looking into this phenomenon.”
“As we speak now, Ghana allows diesel engine without a turbo to be imported into the country but his cannot be done in any European country, South Africa and the United States of America. It is not allowed; it is not possible for you to import a diesel engine without turbo because of their carbon dioxide emitting regulations. We don’t have those standards here in Ghana. In the USA, they have strict emission controls and you cannot bring in any diesel engine at all”, he noted.
Kojo Anobil made said this in an interaction with sit-in host of Anopa Kasapa, Kwakwu Owusu Adjei on Kasapa 102.5 FM on Tuesday.
He was responding to the recently revived national sulphur specification for diesel from 3000pmm (parts per million) to 500pmm effective January 2017 by the National Petroleum Authority (NPA).
Anobil commenting further told Owusu Adjei that the high content of sulphur is diesel fuel was hugely affecting their business, noting that they on daily basis get confronted by their customers whenever their (customers) diesel engines develop a fault.
“When you sell a car it is not just like you buying rice and going home to eat it. If the car’s life span is for 20 years, you are also with the customer for 20 years. That means that you are struggling with the problem for 20 years. The high performance diesel engines – almost all the diesel engines that we sell we have to replace them because the sulphur is destroying them. That high sulphur dioxide is acidic and affects the metal. So within a short time there is wear in the engine and the car becomes weak and consumes a lot of fuel. How can you sell a car to a customer and within five years he or she has to change the engine?” he quizzed.
