Opel to release ‘real world’ fuel consumption numbers from June

Opel has confirmed that it will voluntarily publish fuel consumption numbers reflecting different driving behaviours recorded under the Worldwide Harmonized Light Duty Vehicles Test Procedure (WLTP) test cycle as of June 2016.

The move was first announced in December as part of a bid to increase transparency, credibility and efficiency.

The fuel consumption numbers based on the WLTP test cycle will be published alongside the official fuel consumption and CO2 information for its vehicles, starting with the new Astra.

This will act as an intermediate step towards the Real Driving Emissions (RDE) legislation set to come into effect in September 2017. These plans will see the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) replaced with the WLTP to produce standardised, reproducible and comparable results that better reflect real world driving conditions.

Dr. Karl-Thomas Neumann, Opel Group CEO, said: “We at Opel strongly believe that the industry has to regain trust by increasing the transparency with customers and authorities. Opel takes this step towards RDE to show it can be done.

“We announced in December in which direction we are going; now we are delivering the details. I ask the European Union as well as the EU member states and other European countries to accelerate alignment on test set-ups and test interpretations on real-driving-measurements to stop the existing uncertainty caused by test results that are hardly comparable.”

Read more