Looking for a clean new car ? Look no further

The UK Department for Transport recently released a ranking of cars by their carbon dioxide emissions per kilometre.

This is done in order to enable consumers to choose the cleanest car in the category. The cleanest of all being a Volkswagen Polo with as few as 99 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre.

According to the initiators, this could decrease by up to 24 percent the greenhouse gases emissions of new cars.

According to the website from the UK Department for Transport :

We’ve teamed-up with What Car? to make it easy to find out which top ten new cars have the lowest CO2 in their class. We have used What Car?’s classification system to define which class (for example supermini, small family, executive) a car is in, to make it easier to find the type of car you are looking for.

The aim of this ranking system is not to recommend specific models but to give you information that can help you make a CO2-informed decision. You can refine your search by fuel and gearbox types, and to make life even simpler, we’ve colour-coded each entry to reflect the Fuel Economy Label – it’s like the one you get on fridges and washing machines.

This is a very good idea as consumers can know very easily which is the less emitting car in the category they want to buy.

Cars from the Category A (the least emitting one) are releasing less than 100 grams of CO2 per km when the G Category emits more than 226 grams per km.

In the UK (I’m not sure it the case in France or elsewhere) the cleaner the car, the less the tax to pay. So, this initiative is even more interesting as it enable people to act in a ecological way but also to save money while buying the car, but also when stopping to refill as generally the less the car emits, the less it needs gas.

The Ministry also insist on smarter driving that will also enable people to save money as they will need less gas for the same distance.

The French daily Le Figaro also mentioned this interesting initiative and shows in its article the cleanest car of their categories. In a glimpse, everyone thus can see which is the cleanest.

To me, this idea will bring car makers worldwide to work even more on fuel efficiency and this is surely a good thing as transportation is one of the major sources of greenhouse gases emissions.

Sources and further reading :

• Page from the UK Department for Transport ;
• Frequently Asked Questions ;
• What car ? ;
• Le Figaro article