Do CEE’s Directives Really Compliance with the Kyoto Protocol? A Case Study: Fuel Consumption of one Toyota’s “Little Genius”

Developed Countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol are required to attain the established limits to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or to pay penalty for the exceeding amount. In order to comply with the Protocol, CEE strategy is based on capillary information of fuel consumption of motor vehicles, to be done by producers, coupled to economic incentives to users in order to encourage ecological choices. The need to standardize the measure of GHG emission, related to the fuel consumption of a vehicle, allowed the drawing up of a very detailed procedure that includes the choice of driving simulation on urban and extra-urban cycles. Many drivers claim that the difference between consumption of their own car and values declared by the producer is too high; tests performed by experts and published on trade journals such as Quattroruote (Italy) and Autobild (Germany), also demonstrate this datum; unfortunately nothing can be done to go against producers as such differences mainly depend on almost unrealistic car use simulations. Car producers fully respect the 98/69/CE [1] while the 1999/94/CE [2] is not so carefully followed. Moreover, the presented case study evidences that the board computer (BC), also currently equipping also small cars, furnishes false data aiming to convince driver of fuel consumption that is lower than the real one. Does this also happens on other cars? Is it correct that a consumer must pay an instrument to obtain misleading advertising?