STUTTGART, Jan 31 — According to a study by the environmental research association ICCT, the difference between manufacturer estimates and actual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for new cars has widened, reported German news agency (dpa).
In 2022, new cars registered in Germany emitted 14.1 per cent more CO2 on average than stated by car manufacturers, the researchers announced in Berlin on Wednesday. In 2018, the difference was 7.7 per cent.
For the analysis, the researchers compared official CO2 emissions data from the European Environment Agency (EEA) with real-world consumption data from more than 160,000 cars. The latter served as a measure of the actual CO2 emissions.
The fuel consumption data came from the website spritmonitor.de. The vehicle types analysed were combustion and conventional hybrid vehicles. Cars with a plug-in hybrid drive were, therefore, already analysed in an earlier study.
The researchers assume that the development of CO2 emissions from the new car fleet in Germany is also a good indicator of developments at the EU level.
They justify this in the study with the fact that the German vehicle market is the largest in Europe and the fleet composition for non-electric cars also largely corresponds to the EU average.
The official CO2 emissions of new vehicle models are determined in a controlled laboratory environment. The WLTP (Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure) was introduced in the European Union in 2017 for this purpose.
This is more thorough than the previous NEDC procedure and, therefore, provides more realistic values for pollutant emissions and fuel consumption.
Jan Dornoff, senior ICCT scientist and co-author, said: “Without counteraction, official CO2 emission values will become increasingly unrepresentative of real-world values, and mandatory reductions for official values will not be reflected in the actual CO2 emissions.”
— Bernama
