Vauxhall Corsa ecoFLEX just releasedNovember 4 2009

Vauxhall Corsa ecoFLEX

THE rate of change in car makers’ priorities over these past few years has been truly remarkable and I think we are in the very early stages of a transition that will see us all driving radically different cars within a decade or so.

Vauxhall has just released news of an ecoFLEX version of its Corsa which will have sub-100 g/km CO2 output which means it is exempt from road tax and a lot more attractive financially to business users from a tax point of view too but in truth one of the most significant events of recent times has been the number of manufacturers offering these sort of cars.

All volume car makers have an EU target of averaging less than 130 g/km by 2013 and although Toyota is so far the only one to have achieved this, others will soon follow suit.

Vauxhall and Ford both offer sub-100 g/km cars and the point of this is that these are volume manufacturers. Nigel Sharp, Ford’s head in the UK, said to me earlier this year, it will make a lot more difference to the planet if companies like that sell 100,000 low-carbon emitting cars than having a handful of hybrids which make good headlines but sell in limited numbers.

It’s a valid point although I think that the push for greener cars has gathered the sort of momentum that few could have envisaged even a few years ago. The global recession has turned focus away from out and out performance and more onto getting motoring cleaner for the manufacturer and cheaper for the consumer by virtue of lower fuel consumption.

It’s become the equivalent of an arms race and the prizes for those who really crack the problem of how to deliver affordable, ultra-green cars will be immense.

As I said at the outset, impressive as cars like the Corsa ecoFLEX are, I sense that we have only left the starting line of this journey and that there is a long way to go. When we arrive the motoring landscape will look very different to the one we have today.

The Vauxhall ecoFLEX range is an important part of the low emission, environmentally friendly vehicles you can see at Perrys.