BERLIN (dpa-AFX) - According to a study by the environmental research association ICCT, the difference between manufacturers' specifications and actual CO2 emissions for new cars has widened. In 2022, the difference for newly registered cars in Germany was 14.1 percent on average, as the researchers announced in Berlin on Wednesday. According to the authors, this means that the values were 14.1 percent higher in real operation than stated by the car manufacturers. In 2018, the difference was still 7.7 percent on average.

For the analysis, the researchers compared official CO2 emissions data from the European Environment Agency (EEA) with real-world consumption data from more than 160,000 cars. The latter served as a measure of actual CO2 emissions. The consumption data came from the website spritmonitor.de. The vehicle types examined were combustion and conventional hybrid vehicles. Cars with plug-in hybrid drive were therefore already analyzed in an earlier study.

The researchers assume that the development of CO2 emissions from the new car fleet in Germany is also a good indicator of developments at EU level. One of the reasons they give for this in the study is that the German vehicle market is the largest in Europe and the fleet composition for non-electric cars also largely corresponds to the EU average.

The official CO2 emissions of new vehicle models are determined in a controlled laboratory environment. The WLTP (Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicles Test Procedure) was introduced in the European Union in 2017 for this purpose. This is more thorough than the previous NEDC procedure and therefore provides more realistic values for pollutant emissions and fuel consumption.

In the first year after the changeover, the difference between the laboratory and real values therefore fell from 32.7 percent to 7.7 percent. Now the gap is widening again. Jan Dornoff, senior ICCT scientist and co-author, said: "If no countermeasures are taken, the official CO2 emission values will increasingly lose their significance for the actual emissions". The trend undermines the EU's efforts to reduce transport-related CO2 emissions through stricter regulations. In addition, consumers have to pay more for fuel than expected.

Since 2010, the EU Car CO2 Regulation has stipulated that car manufacturers must declare the CO2 emissions of their vehicles and pay levies if they exceed certain limits. By 2035, new cars should no longer emit any emissions.

According to the authors of the study, official CO2 emission values fell by around 7.3 percent between 2018 and 2022. In real-life operation on the road, however, only less than a third of the reduction of 2.3 percent remained. To compensate for this, the researchers suggest using the data from the fuel consumption measuring devices that have been mandatory in new vehicles since the beginning of 2021.

ICCT Managing Director Peter Mock said: "This will allow a correction mechanism to be set up to ensure that the official CO2 emission values that manufacturers will have to meet in the coming years are updated so that they correspond in real terms to the originally intended and legally stipulated reduction targets." The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) is an independent research organization. It helped uncover the VW emissions scandal in the USA in 2015./jwe/DP/zb