Technology industry making the best progress in moving to emission free fleets

The sixth edition of the Fleet Sustainability Ranking has been published, examining how various industries are transitioning to emission free transport.

Compiled by LeasePlan, the report compares the car fleets of eight industries across 22 European countries, ranking them on the share of diesel, the share of battery electric vehicles (BEVs), the share of hybrids and the average grams of CO2 emissions per km.

The data is drawn from the passenger cars leased from LeasePlan by companies operating an international passenger car fleet. In order that the data is representative for each country, a total of at least 500 vehicles must be leased by at least 10 different companies in each industry.

The industries were ranked 1 to 8 in all four categories and those results collated to provide an overall table.

Coming out best was the Technology industry (Companies primarily involved in the development of hardware or software products) while Healthcare and Pharma (Companies developing, selling or buying healthcare products – including pharmaceutical drugs) brought up the rear – mostly due the high share of diesel vehicles within the industry.  

1. Technology 
2. Financial & Professional Services
3. Energy & Chemicals
4. Industrial
5. Automotive
6. Consumer Goods
7. Construction
8. Healthcare & Pharma

The report digs deep into each industry and reveals some unusual patterns. For example, in the Technology industry there are large differences per country in the pace of moving away from diesel. In the Netherlands 3% of vehicles were registered as diesel, whereas in Austria this was 67%.

There was even greater diesel disparity in the Construction sector, with the Netherlands and the UK having a diesel share of 4% in 2022 while in Germany the share was  87%.

Also within construction, it’s interesting to see that the share of BEVs has grown from 4% to 14% in just two years – a lot of this down to Finland whose BEV share has catapulted from 1% in 2020 to 30% in 2022.

As LeasePlan point out, transport is the fastest-growing contributor to climate change, with road transport accounting for approximately 20% of CO2 emissions in the EU. Given that around 50% of vehicles on the road today are registered to corporate entities, those companies are important in leading the transition to a more sustainable transport system.