Environmental sustainability in the automotive industry

The global green house gas emissions are increasing each year. One major contributor to said green house gasses is the automotive industry. Therefore, it is important to understand what the automotive industry is doing in order to combat this rising issue. This thesis focuses on discovering what kind of steps the industry is taking to mitigate emissions and go green, and how these steps have been presented to the consumers. The main objective can be summarized as attempting to understand how the automotive industry is adapting to the trend of environmental sustainability. The focus of this paper is on the entire automotive industry, rather than on any one company in specific. This thesis is studying the past and future challenges that the industry has faced or is currently facing, in becoming environmentally sustainable and going green and communicating this to the consumers. This is done by performing a literature review. First, this paper introduces and carefully explains the main concepts and topics related to the issue. After that, follows an examination of the regulations and policies set by governmental agencies that affect the automotive industry. The manner the industry has adapted and is pursuing innovation and figuring out a more sustainable future will also be discussed. How this sustainability has affected the automotive marketing is discussed throughout this thesis. By using qualitative research methods and covering secondary data, this research paper will provide the reader with a basic understanding of environmental sustainability, green marketing and greenwashing as well as the past, present and future of the automotive industry related to these topics. Current phenomena like BEV’s and renewable energy projects will be discussed. After a careful analysis of the data, it was determined that the automotive industry has adapted well to going green, despite scandals of the past relating to emission data manipulation and usage of cheat devices in order to avoid sanctions. The industry as a whole has invested greatly into research and development of innovative green solutions and is striving to be more transparent with their corporate social responsibility practices and reporting. This paper shows that the sustainability aspect has a constantly increasing role in automotive marketing. However, it is important to notice that in order to actually be more sustainable, the industry needs governmental agencies to push for greener vehicles and less emissions in total, as without monetary pressure, it is entirely plausible that investments into innovative new solutions will decrease drastically, if not cease entirely