New study: UK car advertising getting better at providing environmental data

UK compliance with EU rules highest of 6 countries studied. However, 57% of UK billboards still not following guidelines.

Thanks to a change in government guidelines, car adverts in the UK have seen a big improvement in provision of emissions and fuel economy data to car-buyers since 2008, a new study has shown.

The study, which we carried out with Friends of the Earth Europe, shows that 76% of magazine adverts and 43% of billboards and posters now include adequate information on CO2 emissions and fuel economy. The results put the UK ahead of five other EU countries that were analysed.

According to a 1999 EU Directive,[2] all countries in the EU should enforce rules to ensure that, when selling new cars “all promotional literature [must] contain the official fuel consumption and CO2 emissions data” and that this should be “easy to read and no less prominent than the main part of the information provided in the promotional literature.”

In contrast with UK press and magazine advertising, which reached 76% compliance with the Directive, the study found compliance for just 36% of press ads in Belgium, 23% in Italy, 14% in Germany, 7% in France and 0% in Spain.

For billboards, the UK’s 43% compliance rate is not good, but is better than the 13% found in Belgium, 5% in France and 0% in Germany, Italy and Spain.

However, with more than half of billboards still leaving out this information, more needs to be done. And new rules should go further in making the data easy to follow, says Blake Ludwig, Director of We Are Futureproof:

Starting at almost zero compliance two years ago, the fact that many car adverts in the UK now include fuel economy information is a big improvement. But we are still seeing too many examples of car-makers flouting the rules and making the data illegible or leaving it out altogether.

There is no room for complacency. Our research also shows consumers don’t understand the plain text format used for environmental data by most advertisers – to them it’s a string of numbers that mean very little - while colour-coded labels are much better understood.

We are asking for all car makers and advertisers to comply with the current rules, and for new guidelines to mandate a much clearer format for the information.

In total, a sample of 804 press advertisements and 111 billboard ads placed in June and July 2009 were analysed for the study.

Previous research, carried out in 2007/8, found that only around 1% of UK advertisers were complying with the Directive, so the new figures mark a big improvement, and the increase is largely due to a change in the UK government’s guidelines to advertisers in January 2009, following our legal challenge.

Read the full report here

Read more about our success in changing the guidelines here