The end of the internal combustion engine in the EU is set for 2035, but even then millions of gasoline and diesel cars will still be emitting CO₂ into the air. It’s not all that bad, car manufacturers repeatedly claim, after all, their engines have become cleaner and cleaner in recent years. Lower fuel consumption has been a popular argument for years when a model gets a new edition.
To ensure that these promises are actually kept, the EU introduced a new testing procedure in 2017, the WLTP cycle. All new models have to go through this in order to determine an official consumption value. This is then shown in the advertisements that advertise the cars. The problem is, according to new research from the nonprofit research organization International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) The gap between the values from the official measurement cycle and the real consumption on the road is increasing.
In 2022, the difference for cars registered in Germany was on average 14 percent, which means that the values in real operation were 14 percent higher than those stated by the manufacturers. In 2018 the difference was an average of eight percent. The ICCT experts analyzed official CO₂ emissions data from the European Environment Agency (EEA) and compared them with real fuel consumption data from more than 160,000 vehicles. These are combustion engines whose owners have stored their consumption data on the spritmonitor.de website.
The results make the climate protection successes of recent years look significantly less than they are sold by the EU Commission. Officially, CO₂ emissions in transport fell by around 7.3 percent between 2018 and 2022; in real operation, according to the ICCT experts, only less than a third of this remains at 2.3 percent.
Large, powerful cars are destroying climate successes
Last week, the European Court of Auditors also found that the progress in reducing CO₂ in transport was mainly due to the increased registration of electric cars. Technical progress has made combustion engines more efficient, but this is being offset by more weight and more horsepower. “Vehicle CO₂ emissions will only really decline when the internal combustion engine loses its dominant position,” said Pietro Russo, member of the Court of Auditors responsible for the report.
There is only speculation as to why the values between the test cycle and normal use continue to diverge. One of them, according to ICCT, is that there are still loopholes through which manufacturers can optimize their cars for laboratory tests. For example, if the car were only driven in the economical Eco mode, it would probably have little in common with how the average driver drives his vehicle later. However, there are still no studies that have examined the differences between the laboratory and the street in more detail.
According to the ICCT experts, it would make much more sense not only to rely on the test values, but also to directly evaluate consumption data from the vehicles. Every car now stores its fuel consumption and this information could be read out without any problem. On this basis, a correction mechanism could then be established that adapts CO₂ emissions to reality.