How to choose a more sustainable new car

Tailpipe emissions are at the very bottom of the sustainability funnel, and those car brands that think they can appeal to a woke, green, eco-conscious or responsible buyer – depending on how you view the whole topic – by talking purely about electrification are mistaken. The conversation begins with the manufacture and ends with the second-life usage of cars, batteries and parts. Somewhere, along the way, and becoming almost incidental to the story, is the method of propulsion. It’s the old well-to-wheel conversation, now called cradle to grave in the absence of a well. The Carbon Trust is developing metrics to evaluate this journey, which takes in the whole shebang, from extracting the raw materials from the earth, to the manufacture, distribution, use and disposal of the product, but a wholesale labelling system within automotive is not around the corner yet.

The ethical behaviour of the brand is paramount to younger consumers, and therefore increasingly their parents too. Where are brands sourcing their rare-earth elements, their minerals and metals? How are they then transporting them to their factories? How are the tier one, tier two and tier three suppliers getting their parts to the plants? By truck? How is that truck powered? Everyone will tell you that picking apart the entire supply chain involved in the manufacture of one car is very tricky. It makes the notion of consumer labelling on products a real challenge: everyone wants to see the sort of colour-coded, easy-to-understand labels that you see now on white goods and properties now applied to cars, but it’s not that simple. Estate agents can evaluate the energy efficiency of a house and that’s enough for property buyers, because they don’t normally switch homes every three years. They also tend not to worry about the carbon footprint of their house’s build because a) it might have been built hundreds of years ago when the planet looked a little different, and b) there aren’t currently 40-odd home builders each churning out a new home every 13 seconds on a production line in the Midlands and then exporting them round the world. Clearly we should all be more responsible about our car purchases. So where to look in the meantime, while the industry works out consumer labelling to help us?

It’s easy to dismiss the meadows planted on factory roofs, the beehives at manufacturing HQ or the 2,000 tulips planted by Bentley in Crewe, but they’re important signifiers of the commitment in hand. It’s hard to communicate the lowering of carbon emissions in a sexy manner that resonates with consumers and makes them want to buy your car, but everyone buys into tulips and bees – it’s the same vision for all, and just a case of how you get there. Bentley has also created a role for a head of sustainability PR: they see the way the wind turbine is facing by examining what their customers are buying, and the shiny piano black surface has overtaken walnut veneer as the decor of choice for the first time. Last year, 30 per cent of Bentley owners were considering an electrified Bentley in the next three years. That figure is now at 60 per cent: a doubling in just 12 months.

Digital car marketplaces, like Auto Trader where I’m editorial director, are also working out their own eco flagging system for consumers, in the manner of the price guides, which indicate whether the car you’re considering has a good or fair price compared with the rest of the market.

The luxury market has the added strength of producing fewer cars than other brands, taking more time to make them and using better materials, with the result that the majority of Rolls-Royces and Bentleys ever made are still on our roads today. Like the Audemars Piguet advert that talks about taking care of the watch for the next generation, car brands will have to think more about how they respond to this customer trend of buying fewer but better things and not just disposing of them after a few years.

Sadly, we don’t all have budgets that stretch to a Flying Spur or Phantom, so for mortals that have to buy from a volume brand, it’s about making responsible choices around leather, recycled fabrics, chrome and wood. It’s about asking the dealers and the car supermarkets to provide more transparency on the car’s overall carbon footprint. It’s also about the tiny everyday things we can all take personal responsibility for: actions like not leaving your fossil-fuelled engine idling, remembering to plug in your plug-in hybrid each night or making sure your electric car is in “B” mode to regenerate as much energy as possible under braking. We can’t berate the brands or the industry if we don’t have our own houses in order.