Overview
CLEANER-DRIVE is a 3-year collaborative research project supported by the European Commission DG Transport and Energy.
CLEANER-DRIVE aims to exploit the experiences, stakeholder contacts and market influence of national programmes to overcome 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 that draws attention to cleaner vehicles and technologies, and to pilot its use in a web-based tool.
Cleaner Drive’s car environmental rating system considers all the major emissions released from cars’ exhausts (tailpipe emissions) as well as from fuel production and supply (fuel cycle emissions) and combines them to give each car a single overall environmental score. Environmental scores are shown as numbers between 1 and 100 – the higher the number the cleaner the car. The rating system considers greenhouse gas emissions, i.e. those that contribute to global warming, and ‘air quality’ emissions, i.e. those that are detrimental to human health and ecosystems.
Funding
Results
Main achievements of the project is the development of the vehicle decision support tool including:
- Identification and review of 20 clean vehicle information resources;
- date compilation in the flied of the availability and reliability of vehicle data;
- identification and characterisation of different national and international vehicle databases;
- compilation of seven national vehicle databases with environmental parameters and calculated environmental score and implementation of 6-monthly updating process;
- 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 six other national Cleaner Drive webportals (Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, France, Austria).
Technical Implications
The support tool can reduce transport costs, cut vehicle emissions and improve corporate social reputation. Since the implementation of the second version of the vehicle decision support tool in the national Cleaner Drive websites, a maintenance plan for short and long term is foreseen. Partners are given the choice to support a central hosted version of the vehicle decision support tool or have received the necessary software to guarantee an efficient implementation of the vehicle decision support tool on their own servers.
Policy implications
On the long term, the advantages of a centrally hosted vehicle decision support tool should not be underestimated. It ensures exchanges of existing information and vehicle data and an efficient tool to provide consumers environmental information on vehicles from a European perspective.