Aston Martin behind debunked anti-electic vehicle “study”

Aston Martin behind debunked anti-electic vehicle "study"
December 5, 2020 9:23 AM   Subscribe

A recent

report

questioning the emissions benefits of electric vehicles has been

convincingly debunked

, but not before

several

media

outlets

ran with it. After some

extensive digging

into the companies and individuals behind the study, it has

become clear

that Aston Martin, despite attempts to

distance themselves

from the report, used a

sock puppet PR firm

registered to the wife of the company's Director of Global Government and Corporate Affairs. Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield details some of the many flaws in the report in

a video

for

Transport Evolved

.

For the TL;DR inclined, the LinkedIn article by Michael Liebrich summarizes some of the key problems with the report's methodology:

The report compared the emissions of a petrol Volvo XC40 and a Volvo Polestar 2, the nearest pure-electric equivalent. The biggest errors Auke identified were as follows:

1. the report used fuel consumption figures based on the WLTP test cycle, but these are well-known to under-estimate real-world figures by a wide margin;
2. the report failed to account for upstream emissions in the production of petrol;
3. the report failed to account for the fact that electricity in the UK (as in every single market of the world) will become cleaner over the lifetime of a car bought today;
4. there appeared to be anomalies in the CO2 footprint associated with the manufacture of the rest of the car, excluding the drive train.

and poses many important about the funding of and motivation behind the study:

1. Who actually wrote the Clarendon Communications report? For all its dodgy figures, it took a team of people a few months to put together. There were drafts, authors, layout people, photo rights to clear, emails to sponsors, discussions about the timing of release. How extensive was the deception?
2. What did senior management at Aston Martin know? This was a sock puppet PR company in the name of the wife (presumably) of the company's Director of Global Government and Corporate Affairs. Aston Martin is a quoted company. There are governance rules. Were they broken?
3. Were stock market rules broken?
4. The MP for Warwick & Leamington, Matt Western, wrote a foreword for the Clarendon Communications report. He is the constituency MP for Gaydon, the site of Aston Martin's HQ and a largest plant, as well as Chair of the All Party Group on EVs, It is entirely appropriate for him to support his largest local employer and to fight for local jobs, so no blame should adhere to him. But will Matt Western now be issuing a statement distancing himself from the report and its dodgy figures?
5. What did the other organisations listed in the Clarendon Communications report know? We need to hear from Bosch, Honda UK, Leaders Live (whoever they are), the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership, McLaren Group, Optare (where former Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer is now Chair), and the Renewable Transport Fuel Association. Were they all in on this, or was it just Aston Martin?
6. Were the journalists who covered the report in on this too, or were they fooled? Did they receive the report directly from Aston Martin and know that Clarendon Communications was a facade? Or was it distributed to them via Clarendon Communications and they did not undertake the basic checks that I did?
7. Will the media outlets which carried the "50,000 miles to emissions breakeven" story now issue corrections?
8. What will the reaction of Aston Martin's institutional investors be? Asset managers and owners want us to believe they have started paying real attention to ESG. So will this sort of behaviour by a major car company have consequences or not? Invesco, Fidelity, Vanguard - what are you going to do?

posted by tonycpsu (34 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite

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