Has Audi's electric dream already run out of gas?

Audi is busy promoting its green fantasy car of tomorrow, while the CO2 emissions of its real fleet are still way off EU targets

Fred Pearce
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 January 2010 07.00 GMT
If there is one thing to be more wary of than an advertisement for a new product, it is an ad that isn't selling you any product at all – just image, pure and simple. So, in the middle of a recession when car sales are low, Audi last week bought the back pages of the Guardian and Sunday Times, and no doubt others, to tell us about what its largest typeface called "a very, very quick glimpse of the future".
This week, Audi used the Detroit Auto Show to show us that glimpse: its e-tron concept car, "an electric car with electrifying performance" that was originally unveiled at the Frankfurt Motor Show last year. Concept cars are mock up models that never reach the showrooms in their present form.
It's nice to see electric cars being promoted as fit for more than just getting around town – albeit only at motor shows and on the back pages of newspapers. But we are entitled to be cynical. This corporate image advertising has a deservedly bad reputation for greenwash.
In the world of oil companies, for instance, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the amount of money spent promoting corporate green aspirations and actual investment in delivering clean energy. Witnesses the millions spent by Shell.
So what is Audi doing out in the real world? The answer is not nearly enough. It is so far behind the green curve that the company told me this week it won't have its first hybrid on the market for almost another year, and no electric vehicles before the end of 2012.
True, last month, its A3 2.0 picked up the "green car of the year 2010" award, sponsored by America's Green Car Journal, at the Los Angeles Auto Show. But how come the award was made even before 2010 was under way? It seems that date inflation by the award organisers was keeping pace with inflated environmental claims by Audi.
The diesel-powered A3 2.0, has CO2 emissions of 115-147 grams per kilometre. This is better than average, but with a range of cars now under 100g, it hardly meets the citation from the journal's editor that the car "defines what a green car should be".
The Audi website also has a page on "green issues and sustainability" (pdf). In keeping with the company's famous slogan, Vorsprung durch Technik (advancement through technology), it focuses on how the company is improving engine technology so you save fuel without noticing any change in performance.
This is good. But before you start believing the hype, read the latest report from Transport & Environment (pdf), an independent European think tank. It uses official data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act to chart progress by major car manufacturers to reduce CO2 emissions from their cars in Europe. And guess where Audi and its owner Volkswagen, which together sell more cars in Europe than any other company, appear?
They are third from bottom in a table of 14, with fleet-average emissions for cars sold in 2008 at 159g/km. This is way off the voluntary target of 140g/km agreed between the EU and European car manufacturers more than a decade ago to be achieved by 2008. Audi tells me its average in 2008 was a very poor 175g, though the early months of 2009 were close to the lower Volkswagen figure, which would be "better than all but one of our key competitors".
To be fair, most other manufacturers also missed the target. The EU average for cars sold in 2008 was 152g. Only Fiat and Peugeot-Citroen have got below 140g.
They all have a long way to go to meet the EU's new target of 130g across average fleets by 2015. And Audi and its owners at Volkswagen more than most. The Transport & Environment report notes caustically that "the Volkswagen group … have a strategy of selling fuel efficiency as an option, rather than as standard". Audi denies this and says it works "to improve fuel efficiency as part of the normal development process".
But even so, take a close look at that ad. It is, as they say, a "very, very quick glimpse of the future". Now you see it; now you don't.