While the Volkswagen Golf Bluemotion picked up the ‘Green Car of the Year’ award at the prestigious What Car? Green Awards 2010 (see story), the winners of the first LowCVP Low Carbon Champions awards were also announced.
The awards night at the LowCVP’s annual conference saw both What Car? and the green transport association hand out their honours.
The inaugural Low Carbon Champions awards designed to recognise best practice among vehicle manufacturers, fleet operators and developers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with transport.
The winners include Oxford YASA Motors, a spin-out from Oxford University that has developed a high-efficiency, lightweight electric motor for use in electric and hybrid vehicles. The company was only founded in September 2009 but has already achieved sales of more than £200,000.
Dr Tim Woolmer, Chief Technical Officer at Oxford YASA Motors, said: “We are delighted to win this award which will help raise our profile in this exciting market.
“Innovation is the foundation of the company and we believe that our technology will form a key part of exciting new high performance vehicles with low carbon emissions.”
Winner of the Special Award, Ali Clabburn founder car-sharing website liftshare said: “It is such a privilege to do something you love, and something which really makes a difference to society. We put real passion into helping people travel more sustainably, so to be recognised as Low Carbon Champions is the icing on the cake – especially when there are so many organisations doing other great things to help reduce our impact on the environment.”
Ali founded the car-sharing website when he was still a student in 1998. Today, liftshare is the UK’s largest national network of 1,300 car-sharing schemes. More than 375,000 individuals have signed up, sharing about 250,000,000 miles and saving over 80,000 tonnes of CO2 each year.
Following a rigorous judging process, a total of 22 companies and organisations made the shortlist. Now in its seventh year, the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership (LowCVP) Annual Conference is the UK’s leading conference on low carbon transport policy and practice.
Other winners included TfL London Bus Service, Greenergy International, LeasePlan UK, the Commercial Group, BMW and Iveco.
TheGreenCarWebsite.co.uk was commended for its part in reducing transport emissions under the Special Award category.
