What do we see?
In the last few years, the environmental performance of new cars has been steadily increasing, shown by the Ecoscore evolving from 59.8 in 2010 to 69.9 in 2020. At the same time, the climate impact has decreased, with a drop of over 10% – from 121g/km CO2 to 108.4g/km CO2 – between 2019 and 2020. The CO2 emissions level for 2020 was the lowest of the reporting period. This improvement might be due to a growing share of alternative vehicles such as EVs, CNG, LPG and petrol hybrids, which now make up 19% of the market. Another possible explanation could be the lower share of petrol and diesel cars.
What’s the aim?
A circular economy aims first and foremost at a lower material and carbon footprint. In addition, improvements in terms of material footprint should not be at the expense of emission rates.
What does this indicator measure?
In general, climate impact and Ecoscore values measure the environmental performance of cars in terms of lifecycle emissions. With this indicator in particular, we focus on new cars entering the market as trends will be much more visible compared to the whole car fleet.
The Ecoscore values are weighted averages for the environmental performance. The score is composed of three parts: well-to-wheel greenhouse gas emissions (50% of the score), air quality (40%) and noise (10%).
CO2 emissions during the use phase count towards the carbon footprint. Other emissions are also included in the Ecoscore values. The data for this indicator was provided by Ecoscore, which is managed by VITO.
