Overview
Cleaner Drive is a project initiated by the European Union with the lead of the Energy Saving Trust (UK). For Switzerland the project was financed by the Swiss Federal Office for Roads (FEDRO - ASTRA), the Federal Office for Energy (FOE - BFE) and the Federal Office for Education and Science (OES - BBW).
CLEANER-DRIVE is a 3-year collaborative research project supported by the European Commission DG Transport and Energy. It aims at exploiting the experiences, stakeholder contacts and market influence of national programmes for overcoming barriers to the introduction of cleaner vehicles in Europe.
One of the key objectives of CLEANER-DRIVE is to develop a robust European methodology for vehicle environmental rating which draws attention to cleaner vehicles and technologies, and to pilot its use in a web-based tool. Switzerland first develops VEL2, a program for efficient vehicles in the canton Tessin and second transfer this information to the other parts of the country.
The decision support tool will make the rating methodology visible to the user and is the core of the seven national websites on clean vehicles. The decision support tool has been developed after intensive stakeholder consultations amongst users on the requirements for a rating methodology and a web-based information tool. Thereafter a period of one year of stakeholder feedback was held. Based on the feedback important changes were made.
Funding
Results
Main achievements in the task of the development of the vehicle decision support tool (workpackage 4.3 of the complete CLEANER DRIVE project) are:
- Identification and review of 20 clean vehicle information resources;
- Extensive research into the availability and reliability of vehicle data;
- Identification and characterisation of different national and international vehicle databases;
- Compilation of 7 national vehicle databases with environmental parameters and calculated environmental score and implementation of 6-monthly updating process;
- Consultation with a wide range of stakeholders, including vehicle manufacturers, national Government representatives, trade associations, vehicle and fuel experts, environmental economists and national cleaner vehicle programmes;
- Analysis of functional design of databases and vehicle decision support tool;
- Technical development of the vehicle decision support tool (http://www.vito.be/CleanerDrive/asp/CDhome.asp) ;
- Integration of the vehicle decision support tool in the UK pilot site http://www.cleaner-drive.co.uk/;
- Integration of the vehicle decision support tool in the 6 other national Cleaner Drive webportals (Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, France, Austria);
- Organised stakeholder feedback on the functionalities of the DST;
- Improvements of version 1 of the vehicle decision support tool and development of version 2;
- Writing of maintenance plan with short and long term vision on further development of vehicle environmental rating and it's implementation in web-based information portals, of which a vehicle decision support tool is the major part.