But haven’t you forgotten something?
If I told you that I had given up hunting foxes with hounds, but conveniently forgot to mention I go hunting for stags with a 12 bore, you might rightly think I wasn’t telling you the whole story.
Well obviously that kind of thing happens in the motor industry as well, for in a pre Paris Motor Show speech, Prof Dr Martin Winterkorn, chairman of the board of Volkswagen AG, declared the Volkswagen Group as green and in fact, as “Champions of Economy” with models from across Volkswagen, SEAT, Audi & Skoda all having reduced emissions and lower fuel consumption.
Now we like all of the Volkswagen Group products a lot and yes, like the majority of car makers, Volkswagen has worked hard to clean its act up with a string of lower CO2 vehicles such as their “BlueMotion” models with promises for the future of CO2 as low as 109g/km for the Passat and 99g/km for the BlueMotion Golf. At this time, the BlueMotion Passat you buy however will produce a CO2 of 128g/km, still very credible, but it seems we have to wait a bit for the 109g/km Passat but truth is every new car they offer, seems to improve on its predecessor.
So that’s all good stuff, but what Prof Dr Martin Winterkorn didn’t mention when claiming the “Green Crown” was the unveiling at the same Paris show of VW Groups V10-powered four-door Lamborghini concept car producing well over 300g/km or the latest open-topped version of Bugatti’s Veyron, which is one of the dirtiest cars in the world with a C02 of 574g/km and with each gallon of gas putting a massive 20lbs of CO2 into the atmosphere and that’s about 2.4lbs for each mile traveled.
So it seems that whilst making the speech and claiming to be the “champions of economy” (for giving up hunting I suppose), VW conveniently kept the Holland & Holland over & under tucked well out of sight behind the podium.
Good work VW, and you are doing as much as anyone to get the everyday cars we drive to pollute less, but you cant (when it suits you) conveniently forget that you make a single car that chucks out more pollution than 5 Golf’s (all running at once) would.
That said, wouldn’t we all want one if we could afford it.
