BBR Switches to using Tesla.
Brisbane Building Reports has very exciting news! From December 2021, BBR has been using a Tesla Model 3 to drive to and from our inspections. As many would know, this is a large investment for our business but an important step towards reducing emissions. In this blog, we’d like to explain the reasoning behind the switch and what this means going forward.
Being a mobile business, we can clock up to 32,000 km travelled each year. This means in the three years BBR has been operating, around 92,000 km has been clocked. To put this into context, the average Australian will clock around 13,301 km in a year, which equates to roughly 40,000 km in three years.
Up until now, BBR was using a 2018 Mitsubihshi Triton, which emits approximately ten tonnes of CO2 each year. In switching to the Tesla, our travel emissions are projected to be cut to approximately three tonnes, which brings the business emissions closer to that of the average Australian of around two and a half tonnes despite travelling two and a half times the average distance.
These estimates prompted the idea to make the switch which was further cemented by the realisation that everything the ute could do, the Tesla could too. The general mindset of the industry is that a ute is required to do the work when that isn’t always true – and as a builder who has been in the industry for 40 years this was a mindset that was difficult but necessary to overcome. We hope that the industry, particularly the building reports sector, also moves towards this conclusion in the future. As a building inspector we can carry the same tools (e.g. a ladder, our thermal imaging camera, etc) that help us give the highest quality inspection reports in the Tesla, just on a roof-rack instead of in a tray.
To quickly do the math for carbon emissions for both vehicles and to aid in visualisation – one tonne of CO2 is 27 feet (8.2296 metres) cubed – the length of an Australian telegraph pole cubed or just shy of a three-storey residential building cubed. The Triton’s ten tonnes of CO2 is 45 feet larger than the wingspan of a Boeing 747-8 cubed and 20 feet larger than a Giant Sequoia cubed. In three years driving the Triton 810 cubic feet of CO2 was created which is two thirds the size of the Empire State Building cubed or 7 feet smaller than the Infinity Tower right here in Brisbane cubed. The Tesla on the other hand will produce roughly a “Restricted Access 25 metre B-Double” amount of carbon cubed per year.
Brisbane Building Reports will continue to look for ways to reduce our carbon footprint and still deliver the same high quality service – like we have in this case. For more information on our plans and implementations as they happen, please visit our page here or our social media.
