The official new car CO2 figures for 2016 published today by the European Environment Agency are worthless and the claimed savings hot air, green transport group Transport & Environment (T&E) has said. The testing system is utterly discredited and the claimed fall in emissions is largely achieved through manufacturers manipulating the outdated tests. In 2015 new passenger cars emitted on average 119.6 grammes (g) of carbon dioxide (CO2) per kilometre – 3% lower than in the previous year. The reality on our roads is that the efficiency of new cars has been largely unchanged for four years.
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Greg Archer, clean vehicles director at Transport & Environment, said: “Official figures on carmakers’ new car CO2 emissions are hot air. Most of the measured improvement is being delivered through manipulating tests, not real-world reductions. The chasm between the reported data and reality makes today’s announcement worthless. Without a new test conducted by genuinely independent testing bodies, drivers will continue to be misled while the planet warms.”
The long overdue regulations to introduce the new test must be tabled immediately by the European Commission and commence next year. Until Europe gets a new test conducted by independent testing organisations drivers will continue to be deceived and progress to tackle CO2 emissions from cars will stall.
T&E has been collaborating with Peugeot-Citroën to produce a real-world driving test that generates realistic fuel consumption and CO2 data, which is typically 40% higher that the official figures. The real-world performance will be assessed for all PSA models by the summer providing drivers with the information they need to make an informed choice.
“Peugeot-Citroën is leading the way in providing realistic fuel consumption information for drivers and it is time for other manufacturers to follow suit. But the European Commission also must require real-world CO2 tests to complement those they recently introduced for nitrogen oxide air pollution from cars”, Greg Archer concluded.
The EU’s first obligatory rules on carbon emissions require car manufacturers to limit their average car to a maximum of 130g of CO2 per kilometre by 2015, and 95g by 2021. Manipulation of tests has therefore contributed to average emissions achieving the target two years early.
