New car advertising rules

What we are campaigning for:

Car advertising is an important part of how people choose a new car. But, at the moment, information about the environmental impact of cars (and the cost of the fuel they will use) is hidden away in small print.

We want to see stronger regulations on car adverts, so that the CO2 emissions and other impacts of a car are shown clearly and legibly, in a way everyone can understand.

A new EU Directive on car advertising will be put forward in 2012. The last one, in 1999, said that text-based CO2 and fuel economy information had to be included on adverts. We want the new Directive to require a colour-coded scale to be shown with the information presented in a standard, easy-to-follow format, and for the regulations to cover TV adverts, electronic billboards and websites, not just printed material.

Since 2006, we've been researching the evidence, monitoring adverts and testing new formats, and our recommendations for the new Directive were published in a detailed report in November 2011.

Download our report here or by clicking on the cover image opposite.

What we have done to help improve car advertising:

In 2007, in collaboration with a barrister, Blake from We Are Futureproof identified a significant breach in the UK’s implementation of EU Directive 1999/94/EC.

This Directive covers the availability of consumer information on fuel economy and CO2 emissions in the marketing of new cars, and requires that all promotional literature contains official fuel consumption and CO2 emission data. However, research showed that most billboard posters and a significant proportion of print adverts for cars showed either no CO2 and fuel economy information, or presented it in too small a typeface to be easily read.

The main reason for these breaches was the Department for Transport’s guidelines for car advertisers (published by the Vehicle Certification Agency), which wrongly included billboards and print adverts under a category of ‘primarily graphical information’, which is not subject to the rules on CO2.

Since 1999, car manufacturers had been using the loophole provided by these guidelines to leave CO2 information out of as many adverts as they could.

Throughout 2008, we worked with the legal team at Friends of the Earth to put together a legal challenge to these guidelines, and We Are Futureproof diligently documented the continuing breaches of the Directive by advertisers. Finally, in June 2008, the DfT confirmed that the government would review the guidelines.

The new guidelines were released, but we did not leave things there. Further lobbying and engagement with the DfT resulting in a new provision that the typeface used should be large enough to be legible to the target audience for the advertisements – in particular that billboards should be readable from across the street. The final guidelines were published in January 2009.

These changes have made a huge difference to the availability of CO2 information to new car buyers, as a 2010 monitoring report, comparing countries around Europe showed.

Download the European monitoring report here or click on the cover image opposite.

We have still not finished this work. The campaign continues with monitoring of compliance, since a wide range of adverts still breach the guidelines for billboards.

We are also working hard to make sure the planned new EU Directive contains much firmer rules, including easier-to-understand colour-coded CO2 labels and provisions that cover websites, electronic billboards and TV adverts.