Average new car sold in Europe is now both cleaner and cheaper says T&E report
Thu 29 September 2011
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In its latest report on car maker progress towards EU CO2 targets Transport and Environment (T&E) says that the average new car sold in Europe was 4% more fuel efficient, emitted 4% less CO2 and was also 2.5% cheaper in real terms than a year earlier. T&E says that this provides further evidence that the motor industry repeatedly overstates the cost of meeting emissions reduction legislation.
The Brussels-based NGO's report shows that CO2 emissions from the average new car sold in Europe last year dropped to the milestone figure of 140g CO2/km. However, T&E says, like-for-like retail prices have not increased dramatically since legally-binding CO2 targets were introduced, as the car industry predicted; but have actually fallen every year in real terms.
T&E says it examined two studies, carried out in 2001 and 2006, for the European Commission which were based on data supplied by the motor industry. The earlier report predicted that reaching 140g/km would cause the retail price of the average new car to increase by €2400 while the later study said the increase would be €1200. In fact, like-for-like retail prices actually fell across Europe by 2.4% a year, on average, since legally binding CO2 regulations were announced in 2007.
The study shows that progress was more evenly spread across car makers than before; Europe‘s eight largest carmakers by sales all reduced CO2 within 2% of the average i.e. between 2 and 6% in 2010. Volvo were the best performers with a 9% average reduction in CO2 across all sales.
The top four in terms of fleet-average CO2 emissions remains unchanged. Fiat leads with 126 g/km, followed by Toyota, PSA and Renault.
The industry as a whole is only 7% away from hitting its 130 g/km target for 2015; last year it still had a 11% gap to close
Jos Dings, Director of Transport & Environment said: “The car industry has consistently resisted fuel efficiency regulations by complaining that cars would become ‘unaffordable’. But car emissions have now dropped to 140g CO2/km and that simply hasn’t happened; prices have actually fallen in real terms.”
“Clearly the EU needs to learn lessons from this. When it comes to future targets to improve fuel efficiency, industry cost estimates should be taken with an SUV-sized pinch of salt.”
The T&E report says that Europe’s largest car market, Germany, made the second-worst progress in cutting CO2 emissions from new cars in 2010, with a cut of just 1.8% averaged across sales of 2.8 million vehicles. (T&E notes that Germany’s poor performance is unlikely to be helped by a new car co2 label agreed by Berlin in July which puts small efficient models such as the Smart and Fiat Panda in the ‘D’ category, while the Audi Q7, a large SUV, gets a green ‘B’ rating. )
Slovakia was the EU country showing the least progress with the average new car sold emitting 1.3% higher CO2 emissions than in 2009. By contrast, Denmark made an impressive 8.9% year-on-year reduction.
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