“A truck is not a bigger car,” says Volvo CEO Leif Johansson. “Trucks perform important transport work, and emission measurements must take into consideration the load transported by the vehicles, not only how much each vehicle emits over a certain distance.”
“A better measurement is emissions per ton kilometer,” says Leif Johansson. “Unless we also take into consideration the load transported by the vehicle, the risk is that transport companies, in order to meet the requirements, will choose to operate three small trucks instead of one large one, which will lead to considerably higher emissions, as well as increased congestion, noise and similar problems.”
Another matter that has been discussed concerns the technology to meet the emission requirements, but Leif Johansson is not particularly worried about this.
“We don’t believe that it is impossible to meet the requirements in purely technical terms, but to achieve genuine reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions, the requirements must take into account more than merely emissions per kilometer, otherwise there is the paradox that we will risk having higher emissions.”
October 11, 2010
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