Car websites - can you find the CO2?

More good stuff from We Are Futureproof, the successor to the Alliance Against Urban 4x4s, which is making great strides in changing how cars are promoted and advertised.

With our regular collaborators at Friends of the Earth Europe, and in partnership with the Energy Saving Trust, we commissioned an excellent piece of research into how well different car-makers’ websites provide CO2 information about their vehicles.

This research was needed, we all agreed, because car-makers and advertisers have consistently objected to We Are Futureproof’s efforts to have CO2 information included on billboard and magazine adverts - instead arguing that consumers would rather use the internet to find out the efficiency of potential cars.

We’re not convinced by this. Information about fuel efficiency and emissions can be provided in a few words of text or a simple graphic, both of which are easily included on adverts, so why not just put it everywhere cars are promoted? And the question that remained (with the web being the preferred way for car-makers to give us efficiency data) was how well are they actually doing at providing this info on the websites?
 
Carried out by Dr Ben Lane at consultancy Ecolane, the research project aimed at answering this question involved more than 400 car-driving members of the public spending a grand total of 55 hours searching for CO2 figures for specific cars late last year. Meanwhile, Ben and his team measured everything that happened, from the time it took to find a figure, to the accuracy of the answers to the number of mouse clicks involved.

And, sadly but not surprisingly, most websites didn’t do very well. The headline figure is that just 52% of website visits resulted in a volunteer finding an accurate number for the CO2 emissions of the relevant car.

Interestingly, though you’d expect manufacturers with cleaner cars on their books to do more to promote emissions data, there was no correlation between the average CO2 of a manufacturer’s cars and the quality of their web info.

The number of searches (more than 1,000 in total) and the robustness of Ben’s study design, (which included a ‘best practice’ metric combining all the different measurements) also meant that he was able to produce one of my favourite things: a league table, reproduced below from the Guardian's report.

A set of guidelines for how to do things properly was also produced, based on the results, comments from participants, and the techniques used by top performers Mini, Kia, Lexus and Honda.

These are:

• Display CO2 values on or close to the home page
• Provide CO2 info as part of the main basic data on a car
• Provide ‘comparative’ information – show VED bands/ VED cost or several models on one page
• Use unambiguous model descriptions
• No reliance on downloads (pdfs)

And the really good news is that, while the results are aimed at influencing a new EU Directive on car labels and advertising later this year, car-makers are already listening.

Reps from several companies attended the research ‘webinar’ at the LowCVP, where Ben presented the results, and we hear from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders that they are planning to put the key conclusions in their policy documents soon.

Download the full report from the Energy Saving Trust here.

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