This study shows that, in the period 2008 to 2011, a time before CO2 standards for trucks came into effect in the US, truck prices increased but fuel efficiency remained broadly static. Coming into force in 2011, standards ensured the deployment of fuel saving technologies and brought about a 24% fuel efficiency gain from 2011 to 2017.
This is T&E's report on why Europe’s obsession with diesel cars is bad for its economy, its drivers and the environment.
The EU is negotiating trade deals with Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay), Indonesia, and soon Malaysia, These trade deals represent a risk for the EU’s sustainable transport plans. All mentioned countries are producers and exporters of crop-based biofuels, especially from palm and soybean oil that have higher overall emissions than fossil diesel. All ongoing negotiations include chapters on energy and raw materials.
This report assesses how the EU and Nordic countries could achieve zero GHG road freight and buses by 2050. The report analysed “off the shelf” technologies and strategies (defined as low hanging fruit), such as improving fuel efficiency in diesel trucks or moving more freight into railways. In addition, it also assessed how we could move beyond “low hanging fruit” and fully decarbonise the road freight sector. For this we looked at technologies such as catenary-hybrid, battery electric, hydrogen and power to liquid. All of this information was fed into T&E’s in-house transport model.
Last July, the European Commission’s Strategy for Low Emission Mobility promised a ‘phaseout of food-based biofuels’. However, this promise of a phase-out is not visible in Annex X of a leaked draft proposal of the Renewable Energy Directive (RED). The leak points to the Commission’s intention to keep 3.8% of 1G biofuels in transport fuels in 2030. This is only 1.1 percentage point less than the 4.9% share of 1G biofuels in transport in 2014. In this briefing T&E analyses: how much would the Commission’s draft proposal increase EU transport greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the 2021-2030 period compared to a ‘proper’ phase-out of 1G biofuels?; how much underestimation of EU transport GHG emissions in the 2021-2030 period would the draft proposal lead to – as a result of the zero-counting of biofuels – compared to a ‘proper’ phase-out of 1G fuels?
This report, released on the first anniversary of the Dieselgate scandal, exposes the shocking number of dirty diesel cars on the EU’s roads and the feeble regulation of cars by national authorities that have focused on protecting their own commercial interests or those of domestic carmakers. In the US, following the disclosure that VW had cheated emissions tests, justice has been swiftly and effectively delivered. This is in stark contrast to Europe where VW claims it has not acted illegally, no penalties have been levied and no compensation has been provided to customers.
After having demonstrated in 2016 that indirect TPMS could be optimised to pass the regulatory test but fail to perform appropriately on the road, Transport & Environment (T&E) commissioned Dekra to carry out an independent on-road field survey to measure tyre pressure of about 1,000 cars in Italy and Portugal from random drivers.
The 2050 strategy being developed by the European Commission for the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) is of key importance to the future of European climate policy. The strategy's central aim is to guide European climate policy towards adhering to the Paris climate agreement, ie how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from all sectors of the economy to limit global temperature rises to well below 2ºC. In this paper T&E describes the model and reports on some of its technical limitations and proposes measures to ensure robust, trustworthy modelling.
Fuelling Spain’s Future: How to boost the economy while leaving carbon behind shows that improving the efficiency of cars and increasing the number of zero emissions vehicles on the road will lead to a larger economy.
Spain has to reduce its non-ETS greenhouse gas emissions by 26% in 2030, and transport is the highest emitter within these non-ETS sectors. As a result, and also to comply with the EU's long-term decarbonisation goals and the Paris agreement, Spain must take urgent and robust action to reduce the emissions in transport. In this report for the European Climate Initiative (EUKI), T&E analyses and proposes a series of key actions that Spain should undertake to decarbonise transport.