WhatGreenCar?

A useful web site that rates new cars on sale in the UK by their overall environmental impact

WhatGreenCar.com is a web site designed to help visitors assess the environmental impact of different cars on sale in the UK.

Whereas the government tends to base its environmental assessments (and taxes) purely on fuel economy and emissions, WhatGreenCar attempts to take a more holistic approach. It awards each model a score between zero and 100, where zero is the greenest, basing the score on a variety of weighted factors. These include the type of fuel and the impact of extracting it; the environmental cost of building and shipping the vehicle and its component parts; the overall emissions in use, and the impact that those emissions have.

It’s impossible to assess the accuracy of WhatGreenCar’s data in terms of real-world harm, but the site is brave enough to disclose its sources - it references a plethora of academic papers and prior work such as the European Cleaner Drive Programme. The site’s method produces results that may surprise some: Toyota’s Prius - widely regarded as an environmental icon - achieves a worse score than Ford’s similarly-sized Focus 1.6 Econetic TDCi Estate (35 for the Prius and 33 for the Focus).

WhatGreenCar is run by a small Bristol-based consulting firm, Ecolane, and the data appears to be free of vendor bias.

The site allows visitors to search using a wide variety of factors, such as vehicle size or type, or by fuel source. It provides top 10 lists in each vehicle category, or according to selected user criteria, and also offers background information to help visitors understand the differences between different types of engine.

As well as an overall score, figures are provided for each model’s tax band, CO2 emissions, miles per gallon and fuel costs per mile.

All in all, the site makes it very it simple to see how particular cars compare to others in the same class. Our only criticism is that the categorisation of cars into distinct segments such as small and large family cars is poorly suited to the fuzzily divided reality. For example, the Focus Estate is classed as a small family car and the Prius as a large family car, although the Ford is actually longer, wider and taller.

Users will also have to look elsewhere for additional data if they wish to compare the green credentials of models with similar performance, in terms of acceleration or top speed. Overall, however, we felt WhatGreenCar provides a very useful tool for choosing between the many different models of car offered to UK buyers, helping to make sense of the various environmental claims of car makers.