by Biba Hartigan 2008

With the introduction of new technologies to tackle the problems of vehicle emissions making the right choice for a greener fleet is everything but fleet. The choice between ethanol, electric, hybrid, LPG, petrol and diesel is not, by any means, clear cut but there are two basics which cut across all technologies, size matters and efficiency counts.

Small is beautiful. Get the smallest, most energy efficient vehicle you can to do the job. Generally, the smaller the vehicle, the fewer resources used to make it and the less energy needed to move it around.

Energy efficiency is the priority but there are other considerations, air pollution not the least of them. While petrol vehicles tend to do fewer miles to the gallon, the emissions from petrol engines are less injurious to health than diesel fumes. The particulates in diesel emissions make it more suitable for long distance, A road and motorway travel where the fuel saving outweighs the health hazard. LPG has similar carbon emissions to diesel but is cleaner in terms of nitrogen oxide and particulates. While LPG was the obvious choice a few years ago, now, due to increased energy efficiency in petrol and diesel engines you need to compare more carefully.

The vehicle licensing authority tax bands, based on emissions of new vehicles are a good starting point. However it's the vehicles' performance over some years that matters. Maximise fuel efficiency with regular maintenance. Monitoring fuel consumption and brake pads can indicate where driver training would be beneficial to improve efficiency.

Alternative fuels are seductive in their claims of reduced carbon emissions, however due to the energy use in biofuel or ethanol production, this is not necessarily all it seems. Maize grown for ethanol is reckoned to use 30% more energy to produce than it supplies. There are further issues with availability and controversy over production. Price rises have already been experienced in foodstuffs such as sugar when biofuels increased demand. According to the World Conservation Union, meeting the 2010 EU target to provide 5.7% of transportation fuel from ethanol would use a quarter of the arable land of Europe. The Amazonian rainforest has been diminished for cattle grazing, now the South East Asian rainforest is being felled to plant palm oil, widely used in the food and cosmetics industries, and now destined for biofuel earning it the nickname 'deforestation diesel'.