Sustainability Report 2014
The Volkswagen Groups Sustainability Report 2014 is available as PDF-Document (Link validity: May 2018.)
The Internet Archive filed a copy which originally had a different location.
Target: best-in-class fuel consumption over the vehicle’s service life
The Sustainability Report 2014 represents a very important milestone. Fuel consumption in customer operations is seen as an independent goal. This recognizes that optimizing for the NEDC test does not automatically lead to optimal fuel consumption in real operation (Page 94, emphasis added):
“For products of the Volkswagen brand, the development process is guided by the “Think Blue. Engineering.” Environmental Goals of the Technical Development department. These goals were revised in October 2014, and now include a commitment to “best-in-class fuel consumption in the driving cycle and over the vehicle’s service life”.
Until then, the VW Group had worked with the assumpion that the NEDC test results were representative of the consumption in reality. Without this having been discussed in the previous reports, the following assumptions can be assumed between the lines:
- The NEDC test provides representative results in the sense of monotonously increasing measurement results. So you can at least be sure that in the comparison of two vehicles, the vehicle with better NEDC results will consume less in real operation as well.
- Or even: The NEDC test results are representative in the sense of proportional measurement results. If the real-world fuel consumption were proprtional to the NEDC test results, than oner could basically add a certain percentage to the official test results to calculate the real consumption. (The percantage would depend on individual driving styles – but VW can not influence that)
