Real-world fuel consumption and electricity consumption of passenger cars and light commercial vehicles 2023

Since 2009, with the Dutch policy on CO2 emissions of passenger cars, the effects are
evaluated on the basis of real-world fuel consumption. This report is one in a series that
analyses real-world fuelling data. This effect on the climate of vehicles with internal
combustion engines will last until after 2040, since many newly registered vehicles are with
a combustion engine, and they will last twenty years. With this report, for the first time, the
fleet prognoses of PBL are translated into average CO2 emission factors for different road
types and years. There has been a demand for more detailed information about the climate
impact of mobility, that can be used with the changes in mobility demand and vehicle
usage. These numbers are more realistic that the type-approval CO2 values. Only half of the
change in type-approval CO2 values are observed in real world.
The change to the new test procedure, the WLTP, from the old NEDC, from 2019 to 2021,
has decreased the absolute gap between type-approval and real world CO2 from 50% to
about 15%. At the same time, the WLTP CO2 value is less a predictor for individual vehicles of
the real world CO2 value, than the old NEDC value was. Vehicles with a lower WLTP value do
not automatically have lower real world fuel consumption. Therefore, in order to scale the
findings of this study to the national level, the type-approval CO2 is no longer used as
intermediate. Instead physical parameters, like vehicle weight, are better predictors of real
world CO2. Only for PHEVs the correlation remains and a growing gap is observed, up to
300%, likely because of the already large gap between type-approval and real-world CO2 of
PHEVs, due to the limited fraction of electric driving. In all cases the dependence on vehicle
weight explains the observed trends ansd differences