There are now three manufacturers below the EU target of 130g/km of CO2, clean green cars has revealed.
The target-set by the EU- that carmakers should produce cars with average fleet emissions of less than 130g/km by 2012- has already been beaten by Toyota (124.55 g/km), Fiat (124.61 g/km) and Mini (129.98 g/km), while Hyundai is closing in on the target with a figure of 131.02 g/km.
"We are now seeing real progress by some mainstream car manufacturers on CO2, but there are still wide variations in performance." commented Jay Nagley, Publisher of cleangreencars.co.uk.
However its not all good news as Nagley warns that some of the carmakers will struggle to meet the same target. Car manufacturers talk about the ‘glidepath’ – the rate of decline needed to get from where they are today to where they need to be in 2012. Any mainstream manufacturer with a figure of much over 140 g/km of CO2 is going to have to work very hard to get their average down, Nagley explains, while the big premium brands need to be in shouting distance of 150 g/km. At present, the large manufacturer with the most work to do is Mercedes, with an average CO2 figure of 173.83 g/km – over 20 g/km worse than either BMW or Audi.
At present, the industry is broadly on the right path to get down to 130 g/km by the end of next year, given a reduction of over 5 per cent per year in CO2 output predicts the website. However, much of the recent gains have come from scrappage incentives that have led people to buy a lot of small, economical cars. With the scrappage scheme now at an end, the manufacturers need to ‘lock-in’ those gains and carry on moving forward.
Carmakers which fail to meet the 130g/km target by 2012 will be fined by the EU, so the incentive is already in place to encourage them to succeed.
