How Green is Your Car?

BRISTOL, UNITED KINGDOM – July 31, 2009: The transport sector is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases and many companies produce rating systems to establish how green a vehicle is. However none offer such a complete, comprehensive system as the WhatGreenCar.com ratings.

Over 20,000 vehicles are now included on WhatGreenCar.com, the only automotive website that provides free environmental impact ratings for all new and used cars in the UK.

With vehicle emissions contributing to the increasing concentration of gases leading to climate change, car drivers are becoming more environmentally aware and are looking at ways to reduce emissions produced by their own vehicles. The WhatGreenCar.com rating system looks at the running impact but, in addition, it also takes into account the vehicle’s whole lifecycle.

The fuel and vehicle cycles analysis include all aspects of producing and using fuel, including primary production, extraction, transportation and refining as well as vehicle operations. The emissions inventory takes into account all four EU regulated emissions, together with the three main greenhouse gases associated with road transport.

Once all this information has been collated further analysis is conducted. An impact assessment is conducted which quantifies the impacts of the emissions rather than just the amount of emissions produced, and is achieved by the use of an environmental rating tool first developed by the European Cleaner Drive Programme.

The WhatGreenCar analysis extends the original Cleaner Drive method to include the car manufacture and assembly cycle. The level of environmental impacts are scored between 0-100. The lower the score the less environmental impact.

Below shows how some of the current models compare in the ratings war.

The raw data for the WhatGreenCar methodology comes from a number of reference sources including the Vehicle Certification Agency (for vehicle or tailpipe emissions), the European Joint Research centre (JRC) for upstream fuel production greenhouse gas emissions, and vehicle production modeling using in-house materials data. The modeling also draws on numerous academic papers that estimate the emissions produced during the production of materials used for vehicle manufacture.

All the data enables WhatGreenCar.com to produce the most comprehensive environmental emissions ratings ensuring it is the leading authority in this sector.