BusinessCar calculates the "green-ness" of UK fleet brands
Do you have a fleet in the UK and you want to know how green it is? Business Car, which is specializes in cars for fleets, has taken CO2 emission information for the three best-selling fleet models, the automaker's CO2 reduction figures, as well as other considerations regarding low-emitting models across the range.
Their results are quite interesting. The top marques are, surprise, Toyota, not only because of the Prius, but thanks to clean diesel technology. Volkswagen follows, thanks to the availability of Bluemotion models across the range and a hybrid announcement. Third is Citroën, which has a lot of cars with low CO2 emissions, although the same can't be said for the upper models. Fourth is BMW which has brought "ecology" to the luxury car segment.
On the negative side there's Saab, which struck out due to the Swedish marque's bet on biofuels and the lack of biofuel support in the UK, as well as the lack of availability of smaller models. Then there's Mercedes, which was hit because they don't (currently) have any green technology vehicles on sale; the company's larger cars are available, though. Closing our the four worst list is the Land Rover, with a high CO2 average, and Mazda, which suffers due to a lack of an eco label. I bet they wish Econectic, parent Ford's green brand, could be handed down.
[Source: BusinessCar]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
steven 11:10AM (4/08/2008)
Care to clarify how, on a list of the 20 greenest brands that the 20th greenest make's info is classified as "negative"? Top 20 would infer that there are about 30-40 other brands available in the UK that possibly have done worse. The type of comparative analysis you used is a bit questionable to say the least.
Let's look at M-B: They took the top 3 selling fleet models sold by M-B and compared their avg CO2 output to the average for their "sector". No mention of what those models were or if the "sector" used for comparison was cars in "sector" to which M-B belongs, or to cars in the sector to which the top 3 M-B fleet sales leaders belong. Based on that info, along with some very subjective undefined ranking criteria, M-B's did 34% "better" than the other vehicles in the yet to be defined "sector".
I'm not even sure you can draw any conclusions between some of the makes on the list. You say M-B is a hit, but they are lower on the list than Land Rover who tied with Mazda. L-R's CO2 non-sales weighted fleet average runs from 253 to 315 for goodness sake with a high of 376! Somehow they are less negative than Saab (178 CO2)?.
I know the whole point of the rating for each make was to differentiate them from the vehicles in the same sector, but apart from Toyota and VW up top, I don't what info this list provides other than a justification for fleet purchasers to buy to by L-Rs over a Mazda, M-B or Saab.
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virgil 4:37PM (4/08/2008)
Its a pity mazda doesn't have a "green label" when they're good at making small cars like the 3. Unfortunately the big loser for them is the RX8 which gets 12/16 city/highway mpgs, and puts out a boatload of CO2. It doesn't count for many sales though.
Does anyone really car about L-R or M-B? The people who buy those things generally don't give a cr@p about the environment to begin with, so hitting them with fleet CO2 #s isn't going to change anything.
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