In its report on ‘Saving fuel, saving costs’, the organisation says the statistics imply that corporate fleet managers have more power over the composition of our atmosphere than most politicians, or even most oil executives. 

It adds that transport is responsible for nearly a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, and road transport accounts for 72-81% of that. Europe’s corporate fleets produce around 380Mt CO2e annually, significantly more than the entire emissions of Spain.

The organisation also says that 45% of the total GHG emissions from road transport in the EU come from company fleets. However, the impact of fleet managers’ purchasing decisions is far greater than this, as the majority of company cars are sold into the second hand car market, and so fleet managers control a large proportion of the supply of used vehicles in the private market.

The report also says that in 2012, the corporate fleets of the 28 EU nations:

• Burnt 123 billion litres of fuel
• Costing €200bn
• 32% of the total cost of fleet operation

The report covers a wide variety of different approaches to reducing fuel consumption and the potential savings available:

• Eco-driving – given training, changing road behaviour can cut fuel costs, and emissions, by up to 20%
• Retro-fitting – adding one aerodynamic feature to an HGV can cut fuel use by 4%. With better tyres, weight reduction and other improvements, a reduction of 45% is possible.
• Switching from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, hybrids, trains, barges and teleworking are all evaluated as cost and carbon saving measures.

Greenpeace senior climate campaigner Barbara Stoll said: “Fleet managers have a surprising amount of power over all of our futures, and with the rapid progress being made in clean tech, they can use that power for good, and on a grand scale. Hopefully the enormous potential cost savings will help – instead of asking for sacrifices, we’re just asking them to sacrifice a bit less to oil companies.”