So Who’s the Greenest of Them All?

For most automobile shoppers in the United States, environmental pluses and minuses rate somewhere below the number and location of cup holders in the hierarchy of reasons to buy a particular vehicle.

Otherwise, how to explain the proliferation of gas-hungry, pollutant-spewing pickups and sport-utility vehicles on the road?

But things are changing, not least because auto makers have discovered that, hard as it is to be green, it is far preferable to being brown.

Welcome to the Green Wars.

The first shots are just now being fired as Ford Motor Co.’s chairman purrs around Dearborn, Mich., in an electric-powered Ranger pickup, Honda Motor Co. touts its Sierra Club award for the hybrid gas-electric Insight, DaimlerChrysler sings the praises of (and spends billions in pursuit of perfecting) the fuel cell, and General Motors Corp. executives wonder why nobody gives them proper credit for the sleek EV1 electric sports coupe.

“There is true greenness in Europe, where car-buying decisions are all about efficiency, not about Excursions that get 9 miles a gallon,” said Herbert Tay, head of the West Coast automotive practice for consulting giant A.T. Kearney Inc., referring to Ford’s biggest SUV.

“But as yet there is no market-wide concern for greenness in America. Still, everyone now realizes the need to do something.”

Among auto makers, grabbing for the green crown is likely to be the next big marketing effort after years of competition for leadership in comfort, utility, quality and safety.

“After all, you can only put so many air bags in a car,” said Bill Van Amburg, spokesman for Calstart in Pasadena. The nonprofit industry consortium was formed to pursue and promote development of advanced technologies, including alternative fuel systems, for the transportation industry.

The increased globalization of the auto industry also makes eco-friendliness a major concern.

“When you are selling in countries where every city is crippled by pollution, cup holders are no longer an issue,” Van Amburg says. “Tailpipe emissions are.”

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But if it is hard for auto makers to be green, it can be even harder as a consumer to know just who is wearing the color honestly and how the mantle was won.

After all, if one environmental group lauds Honda as an environmental leader, another says Ford is on top and a third says Ford (quite literally) stinks, how is the poor motorist to know what to do?

For Californians, there are four key organizations that issue broad-based green ratings of auto makers and their products: the Union of Concerned Scientists, Calstart, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, and the state Air Resources Board.

(Make that five, if you count the federal Environmental Protection Agency and its fuel-economy ratings, which address the environment obliquely: The farther a vehicle can travel on a gallon of gas, the fewer greenhouse gases it emits per mile and the less it contributes to global warming.)

All have their agendas, and although they are complementary, their ratings can result in what may appear to be conflicting messages when it comes time to rate the players.

In addition, some organizations have started issuing one-time commendations to the auto makers for environmental achievement.

When the Sierra Club publicly lauded Honda’s Insight, representing the first such endorsement in the group’s 108-year history, the event made headlines and gave the Japanese company a lot to brag about. Here, after all, is a vehicle with a hybrid drive train featuring an electric motor-assisted gasoline engine that delivers as much as 70 miles per gallon. And it is being endorsed by what for many is the premier environmental league in the land--a group dedicated to fighting much of what the auto industry has always stood for.

Almost immediately, an officer of another national environmental group, the Union of Concerned Scientists, took issue.

Honda’s Insight might get great mileage, thus helping to reduce petroleum dependence and lessen degradation of the ozone layer, wrote UCS Transportation Program Director Roland Hwang, but it is no great shakes when it comes to emitting smog-causing pollutants.

Honda makes a Civic that runs on natural gas and has lower emissions than the Insight, he pointed out, and the company this year began selling a gasoline-powered Accord that gets a SULEV rating. Instead of lauding the Insight, given its ultra-low-emissions-vehicle rating, the Sierra Club should perhaps have scolded Honda for not pushing the technological envelope to achieve an even lower SULEV rating for the Insight, Hwang suggested.

Then three months later, on March 15, UCS (Hwang included) issued its first-ever pollution ranking of the world’s auto makers.

Leading the pack, with “the best environmental performance in today’s market,” according to UCS, was Honda.

Confusing?

Consider this wrinkle: Of the 11 auto makers rated by UCS, Ford ranked ninth--just ahead of DaimlerChrysler, whose fleet includes all those big Dodge trucks and high-polluting diesel Mercedes-Benz models, and Isuzu, a company that makes nothing but trucks.

That makes Ford, in the eyes of the Union of Concerned Scientists, one of the dirtiest auto companies on the planet.

That same day, Calstart issued its first-ever “Green Index” report, which polled “opinion leaders” in environmental, regulatory and transportation technology industry groups in North America and Europe to find out which auto makers they considered environmental leaders.

Almost two-thirds said there wasn’t a clear-cut leader yet, but among the 35% that had a choice--you guessed it--Ford was No. 1.

Honda, tops in the UCS study, placed third in the Calstart survey. Toyota was second.

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The trick to making sense of the apparently warring green guides is to understand where each group is coming from.

Calstart, for instance, promotes development and use of advanced technologies--low-sulfur fuels, hydrogen-charged fuel cells and lean-burn, direct-injection gasoline engines. Its Green Index is weighted to take into account what auto makers are doing now that might result in cleaner vehicles in the future.

UCS, however, is concerned about air quality and global warming today.

Its ratings consider all the vehicles in an auto maker’s global fleet and is weighted to favor those with high fuel efficiency and low emissions. Thus Isuzu, which has no lightweight, high-mileage economy sedans to balance its trucks, lands at the bottom of the list. And Ford--where pickups, minivans and SUVs account for about 50% of all sales--also ranks fairly low.

A third rating group, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, evaluates the same vehicles in the same fleets that UCS rates (ACEEE, in fact, helped UCS compile its ratings). But the council goes further, issuing an environmental scorecard for every individual make and model in its annual “Green Book: The Environmental Guide to Cars & Trucks.”

The ratings make clear what models are best for the environment: General Motors’ EV1 (a zero-emissions vehicle under California’s classification system), the Honda Insight and forthcoming Toyota Prius hybrids, and natural-gas burners such as the Honda Civic and Ford’s new Crown Victoria.

But the council also has a practical bent, recognizing that not everyone--in fact, relatively few so far--will trade the convenience and familiarity of a gasoline-powered vehicle for one of the greenest models. So it also rates even the worst--the giant SUVs like Ford’s Excursion and Chevrolet’s Suburban--in hopes that environmentally conscious shoppers who just have to have a truck will at least be able to see which are the least polluting.

“In the Green Book, we show how each particular car or truck scores against all of the other models in its class,” said John DeCicco, ACEEE’s transportation director and principal author of the annual guide. “In UCS’s pollution lineup report, the aim is to show which companies score better than others, based on their entire fleets.”

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Understood in that light, the various ratings systems are complementary.

Even some in the auto industry think so. (The better they score, the better their opinion of the ratings, of course.)

“It is great that they are out there, providing more information and generating more interest” about green issues among consumers, said Ben Knight, vice president of Honda’s Torrance-based Research and Design Americas unit and head of the company’s environmental and advanced technology programs.

But are they enough?

Not everyone thinks so.

“In my mind, environmental performance means more than just low emissions or high fuel economy,” said Ron Cogan, publisher of the San Luis Obispo-based Green Car Journal. “It should include everything from weighing the environmental impact of the materials used in building the vehicle to the environment load it creates at the end of its useful life.”

Martin Zimmerman, Ford’s vice president of government affairs, said the Calstart report comes closest to perfection because it points to where an auto maker is heading, rather than dwelling on the adequacies--and inadequacies--of its current fleet.

“It recognizes that we are spending a lot of resources trying to develop technologies of the future,” he said.

Ken Stewart, GM’s brand manager for advanced-technology vehicles, said he would like the environmental groups to add at least one criterion to their judging mix: “a company’s track record in producing [very low- or zero-emissions] vehicles that have provided real consumer miles driven.”

GM, after all, built the industry’s first electric vehicle marketed directly to consumers. Most other EVs have been made available only to commercial and government fleets.

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There is no huge lobbying effort yet, but comments like those, combined with mounting private and public interest in things green, will probably lead to a uniform system of environmental evaluation at some point, environmental and industry insiders say.

“We are all working on that and we are starting to coalesce on what it means to be a green vehicle,” said Hwang of UCS.

Already in California there is a small effort underway. Starting with 1998 models, all new cars in the state wear a “smog index” sticker while they are at the dealership. The bar-code label rates each model’s pollution quotient on a 10-point scale. The shorter the black bar, the less polluting the vehicle compared with others of the same model year.

But consistent themes in environmental assessment of the automobile should go beyond pollutant emissions to include “climate-changing emissions, fuel efficiency and resource consumption,” said Tim Carmichael, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Coalition for Clean Air.

“Right now we all have our own standards,” said the Green Car Journal’s Cogan, “and understanding them takes a lot of effort by the consumer.”

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Times staff writer John O’Dell can be reached at [email protected].

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Is (Air) Quality Job 1?

Ford Motor wants to be the auto industry’s environmental leader. How are the folks in Dearborn, Mich., doing? Two surveys released March 15 come to starkly differing conclusions. On one hand, the Union of Concerned Scientists found Ford to be the third-worst polluter among the major auto makers. That same day, Pasadena-based Calstart released its “Green Index 2000” survey, which concluded that Ford leads all auto makers in environmental image and leadership. What gives?

Union of Concerned Scientists

Methodology

The organization, working with the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, analyzed the most recent data on air pollution and global-warming emissions to rank the new-vehicle fleets of the major auto makers.

How Others Fare

Isuzu Motors of Japan, which makes only rucks, was found to have the worst-polluting fleet. The best environmental performer? Japan’s Honda Motor, whose fleet includes the Insight gas-electric hybrid and cleaner-burning versions of its popular Accord and Civic.

Can Auto Makers Do Better?

You bet. Last year, UCS says, its engineers used existing technology to design a Ford Explorer that would achieve 50% better mileage and pollute 75% less than the then-current model. The group says its computer model showed that Ford could build the leaner, cleaner Explorer for less than it now spends. Ford executives say the UCS design doesn’t take into account important market considerations such as towing and load capacity.

Credentials

UCS describes itself as a nonprofit alliance of citizens and scientists working for practical environmental solutions.

Information

(617) 547-5552; on the Web, https://www.ucsusa.org.

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Calstart

thodology

Survey of key “opinion leaders” in environmental, transportation, air-quality and energy organizations and agencies to determine an overall “green image” based on environmental and technology leadership. Unlike the UCS study, Calstart’s Green Index rates public perception rather than actual performance.

How Others Fare

Toyota, maker of the forthcoming five-passenger Prius sedan, was identified as the leader in hybrid gas-electric vehicle technologies; General Motors was named No. 1 in electric-vehicle technology, thanks to its limited-production EV1 sports coupe; and DaimlerChrysler won the crown in fuel-cell vehicles for its investment in that arena.

Can Auto Makers Do Better?

Yes--and the “green” crown is still up for grabs. Although Ford was perceived as the top auto maker for overall environmental leadership by those who thought there was an environmental top dog in the auto industry, a full 65% of respondents said there is not yet a clear leader among the companies.

Credentials

Calstart is a division of WestStart-Calstart, a Pasadena-based nonprofit consortium of more than 200 private and public partners devoted to developing and promoting advanced transportation technologies.

Information

(626) 744-5600; https://www.calstart.org.

Sources: Union of Concerned Scientists, Calstart