Jos Dings, director of Brussels-based green transport campaigners Transport & Environment, says that the official CO2 results given by the manufactures on cars sold in Europe "are less and less a reflection of what we are seeing on the road."
Dings says that there has always been a difference between the amount of CO2 a car emits during a controlled test and what it produces when actually driven. He said that gap used to be 20 percent but has risen to as high as 50 percent for models advertised as sub-100g/km cars.
Sigrid de Vries, spokeswoman for European auto industry association ACEA, says that the current test – which dates back to the 1970s – does not factor in today's driving conditions, new technologies and other changes that have occurred over time.
Without an updated test for Europe, the automakers' published CO2 results become less believable every year and therefore threaten the credibility of all green products in the EV space in consumers' minds.
