Company cars are emitting around 40% less CO2 today than they were four years ago.

The dramatic fall in emissions comes from the fact that fleets are increasingly adopting low emission vehicles and are also significantly reducing their annual mileages.

An analysis of vehicles added to ALD Automotive’s fleet of 47,000 vehicles during the last five years reveals that company cars delivered in January 2003 averaged 166.87g/km of CO2 over their average annual mileage of 23,782 miles.

This means their annual CO2 emissions totalled 6.43 tonnes per vehicle.

By August 2007, company cars averaged 154.22g/km of CO2 (7.6% less), while average annual mileage had dropped to 15,139 miles – a cut of more than a third (36.4%) or 8,643 miles.

This means their annual CO2 emissions averaged just 3.79 tonnes – a reduction of 41.17% over the 54 months.

By comparison, one person flying from London to New York creates 0.61 tonnes of CO2, making the annual CO2 savings from each company car the equivalent of four fewer flights across the Atlantic.

Extrapolated across the UK’s company car fleet of 1.2 million vehicles, this equates to a reduction of over three million tonnes of CO2 being emitted each year by company cars.

ALD Automotive says the reductions are the result of fleet decision-makers and drivers heeding Government fiscal warnings to count the carbon or pay the cost.

ALD Automotive marketing director David Yates said: “We have tracked a remarkable transformation in our fleet in terms of both the type of company cars increasingly chosen by businesses and their drivers, and the amount of mileage clocked up each year.”