Quarter of fleet vehicles not Euro 6 compliant

Over 25% of company cars and vans operated by FleetCheck customers do not meet Euro 6 standards, analysis by the company has revealed.

FleetCheck, which runs a fleet software tool, looked at 85,792 registrations and found that 5.3% of company cars and vans only meet the Euro 4 emissions standard or older and a further 18.2% achieve Euro 5.

However, the company says the introduction of Clean Air Zones (CAZ) which mandate Euro 6 minimum standards for diesel vehicles should see this figure come down significantly in the coming years.

Peter Golding, managing director at FleetCheck, said: ‘We compiled these figures to illustrate the disparity that currently exists across fleets when it comes to emissions. While at one extreme, some are actively working to achieve zero emissions, at the other, we can see that almost a quarter of all the vehicles our customers operate are Euro 5 or older.

‘Because there is a strong SME bias in our customer base and these businesses tend to hang on to cars and vans for longer than corporates, they are probably worse than the fleet parc as a whole. However, they remain an indication of how far the industry will have to travel to achieve the kind of low or zero-emissions performance we’d all like to see.

‘It is not uncommon for smaller businesses to continue to operate vans until they become uneconomic to repair or too unreliable for everyday use. Even some of the latter will be kept in the yard as a spare van and used occasionally. However, there is a strong argument that these vehicles shouldn’t be on the road at all, given their poor emissions.

‘On a simpler level, the economics behind the ongoing operation of these older vans are often highly questionable, and getting this message across to businesses is also something that we perhaps should be communicating more widely as an industry.’

Writing in the second issue of the Air Quality News magazine, Andrea Davies, communications manager, British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association (BVLRA) wrote that commercial operators need more support to move to low-emission vehicles.

Read her piece here.

Photo Credit – Big Stock