Confused by this? Urban 51.4-45.6 (5.5-6.2), extra urban 72.4-62.8 (4.4-4.5), combined 62.8-55.4 (4.5-5.1) - you're not alone

05 April 2009

We Are Futureproof (the new name for the Alliance Against Urban 4x4s, like Cif and Jif only much longer and more confusing) is pressing on with our campaign to get clear info on running costs and emissions put on car adverts.

Following last year's victory in getting any info put on billboards and magazine ads at all, last week we commissioned a poll to find out whether a colour-coded scale is easier to understand than the current list of mysterious facts and figures.

YouGov showed 2.007 people the two adverts below, both for a fictional new 'Marko' car, and asked them to say what kind of car it was: 'good efficiency/low emissions', 'medium efficiency/medium emissions', 'poor efficiency/high emissions', 'none of these' or 'don't know'.

The results came back decisively in favour of the ad with the colour-coded scale. Just 3 in 10 people could figure out the right answer from the format currently shown on car adverts (31%), but this increased to more than half (56%) for the colour-coded scale.

We also asked which ad was easier to understand, and four times as many people plumped for the colour-coded format (67% vs 16%).

It's not a great surprise that people find a long list of figures given in 'miles per gallon' and 'litres per 100 kilometres', and including weird technical terms like 'extra urban', hard to relate to. As a green, I'm more familiar with the concept of 'grams per kilometre', but what none of this does is convey information most drivers actually care about, i.e. the cost of driving.

The new format we tested is based on the notices that dealerships currently display next to new cars in showrooms, and this does include the govt standard running costs figure in 'pounds per 12,000 miles' (about a year's worth of driving for the average person with a car). The colour-coded chart also relates directly to another cost - the level of graduated vehicle excise duty ('road tax' to you and me), which doesn't vary nearly as much as it should, but does range from zero for the very cleanest cars to £400 for the most polluting cars in band G.

Showing 'green' information in terms that mean something in people's daily lives is crucial if we're to get across that reducing carbon dioxide is a money saver, and the recent figures on car sales back up our instinct that people are crying out to find ways to reduce the costs of motoring. Unfortunately, with little to go on in car adverts, people are left using the crudest possible measures to guess at how to reduce their costs.

Jillian Anable and Ben Lane are academic researchers looking into this question, and their recent presentation to the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership gives some interesting quotes from motorists that show people mainly think they have no choice but to trade down to a smaller car, or switch to diesel, if they want to reduce their fuel costs.

And the car industry's sales figures continue to show a massive trend to smaller models amidst the wider gloom of falling sales for the industry as a whole. Their February figures show new car sales down by more than 20 per cent on 2008, but the ‘mini' class of smaller cars is bucking the trend with a 40 per cent increase.

Putting the colour scale and running costs on adverts would give people more to go on than just the size of the car. Because, despite appearances, it's not simply a case of small cars being good and big cars being bad. If the format of the efficiency information changed, it would make it much easier for people to see that within every class of car, including family estates and people carriers, vehicles can have very different running costs.

Comments:

siteadmin
Posts: 1

Re: Good, but can it be better?
Reply #2 on : Sun April 05, 2009, 07:38:12

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Oh definitely the format needs to be developed more, and we'll be working on it with other groups and researchers over the coming months.

For this study we simply tested another existing format (from the showrooms) against what is currently on adverts but, as you can see from the image, the colour-coded label is still packed with details and small print that take away from the main message.

Given that, and the fact the question was quite hard (i.e. we didn't put extremes of goodness and badness in the examples) we're pretty impressed with the improvement even with just this change, but it can definitely be improved.

Ian Pouncey
Posts: 2

Good, but can it be better?
Reply #1 on : Sun April 05, 2009, 07:26:41

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While the increase in comprehension is impressive it is still only 56%. Have other methods of displaying this information been considered, or is there a plan to try and develop the idea further? It is easy to see a great improvement, as in this case, and believe that it is good enough. Although 100% would be expecting to much, and familiarity should increase the 56% over time, it seems to me that settling on a solution which fails for almost half is suboptimal if there are other approaches that could be tested.

Could you provide some more information on the development of the proposal please?

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