Beyond ‘Dieselgate’: Implications of unaccounted and future air pollutant emissions and energy use for cars in the United Kingdom

The ‘Dieselgate’ emissions scandal has highlighted long standing concerns that the performance gap between ‘real world’ and'official’ energy use and pollutant emissions of cars is increasing to a level that renders ‘official’ certification ratings virtually ineffective while misleading consumers and damaging human health of the wider population. This paper aims to explore the scale and timing of historic and future impacts on energy use and emissions of the UK car market. To achieve this aim it applies a bespoke disaggregated model of the transport-energy-environment system to explore the impacts of retrospective and future policy scenarios on the UK car market, trade-offs between greenhouse gas and air quality emissions, and fuel use and associated tax revenues. The results suggest that the impacts on human health of ‘real world’ excess NOX emissions in the UK are significant. Future ‘low diesel’ policies can have significant air quality benefits while showing few (if any) carbon disbenefits, suggesting future car pricing incentives may need to be rebalanced taking more account of effects of local air pollution. Car pricing incentives are however unlikely to transform the car market without additional market changes, industry push, infrastructure investment and policy pull aimed at cleaner, lower carbon vehicles.