In a significant ruling, Britain’s advertising regulator has decreed that BMW and MG Motors cannot assert that their electric vehicles produce “zero emissions” due to the environmental impact of manufacturing and power generation processes.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) scrutinized a Google advertisement for BMW, aired in August 2023, and observed that while electric vehicles generate no emissions during operation, emissions are generated during manufacturing and charging phases using electricity from the national grid.
BMW attributed the “zero emission cars” label to Google’s automatic keyword feature and assured that such claims would not recur in the future, which ASA acknowledged.
A similar verdict was rendered regarding an advert for MG Motor, a Chinese-owned British carmaker, also displayed on Google in August 2023. ASA deemed the claim of “zero emissions” lacking material information necessary for consumer understanding and barred its reappearance in the current format.
Colin Walker, head of transport at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, criticized the decisions, noting the government’s push to promote electric cars. He deemed it contradictory for car manufacturers to be prohibited from marketing zero-emission vehicles as such, especially considering the mandate to increase the sales of such vehicles to meet emissions targets.
