Astongate: fake emission figures, an embattled carmaker and a sock puppet PR company

You may have seen the news story last week about a new report purporting to show that it takes 50,000 miles before an EV's emissions beat those of a petrol car. First of all, the figures were comprehensively debunked - the correct figure is nearer 16,000 miles - then, over the weekend I uncovered evidence that the report was written by a sock-puppet PR company run from an address co-owned by Aston Martin's Director of Global Government and Corporate Affairs.

Before I start, a caveat. This story is about getting the truth out EV carbon emissions, and how much lower they are than internal combustion cars. It does not deal with any other aspect of the environmental footprint of EVs, which are considerable and still require much investment and innovation. Nor does it show that EVs are superior to every other form of transport. Even the best EV will always have a carbon footprint, a material supply chain, and will cause particulate pollution. Active travel - walking, cycling, scooting and so on - should always be our first choice. With that said, let's get stuck in!

"Astongate", as I call it, started with widespread coverage of a new study, purporting to show that building an EV involves such huge CO2 emissions that you have to drive it 48,000 miles before it breaks even with a petrol equivalent. It was just the sort of story loved by UK media on the political right - always keen to pour cold water on any sign of green over-reach.

Many leading outlets ran with the story, which must have been read by millions of people:

• Sunday Times: Electric cars only greener than petrol after 50,000 miles
• Daily Mail/Mail Online: Electric cars shock: Manufacturing green vehicles churns out more CO2 than making fuel models
• Telegraph: Electric cars need to be driven 50,000 miles before carbon footprint is better than petrol model, new report suggests
• Metro: Electric cars need 50,000 miles before they are greener than petrol ones, report claims

Now, it's not a secret that the "embodied emissions" involved in building an electric vehicle are higher than those of an equivalent internal combustion vehicle - all those batteries - so it is obvious you have to drive for some number of miles before an EV makes sense from an emissions perspective. But 48,000? Given that the average UK car drives around 7,000 miles per year, that means it could take seven years for an EV to break even.

One thing immediately struck me: the report (which you can find here) appears to have been sponsored by a list of transport industry players not known for their leading positions in EVs: Aston Martin, Bosch, Honda, McLaren, Optare and the Renewable Transport Fuel Association.

So I immediately shot the article over to Auke Hoekstra, Senior Advisor on Electric Mobility at the Eindhoven Technical University. Auke is the probably the world's leading expert on life-cycle emissions of EVs, diesel and petrol cars. He has published peer reviewed papers on the topic, but on twitter he is known as the Debunker-in-Chief, famous for his threads demolishing bogus report after bogus report that claim EVs are worse for emissions than internal combustion vehicles:

• April 2019: Hans Werner Sinn for the prestigious IFO Institute
• July 2019: Fraunhofer ISE Institute
• November 2019: ADAC Germany (world's largest car club)/OAMTC
• November 2020: Professor Michael Kelly / Global Warming Policy Foundation and Spectator

Sure enough, after a long day at his computer in Eindhoven, Auke produced the definitive thread explaining why the correct figure for emissions breakeven was nearer 16,000 miles than the 48,000 miles in the report.

The report compared the emissions of a petrol Volvo XC40 and a Volvo Polestar 2, the nearest pure-electric equivalent. The biggest errors Auke identified were as follows: 1) the report used fuel consumption figures based on the WLTP test cycle, but these are well-known to under-estimate real-world figures by a wide margin; 2) the report failed to account for upstream emissions in the production of petrol; 3) the report failed to account for the fact that electricity in the UK (as in every single market of the world) will become cleaner over the lifetime of a car bought today; and 4) there appeared to be anomalies in the CO2 footprint associated with the manufacture of the rest of the car, excluding the drive train.

At Auke's 16,000 miles, an EV would repay its emission debt after around two years, not seven. Not nearly so bad, given that the average age of a car at scrap in the UK is just under 14 years - and the average life is likely to be over 16 years, since around 20% of used cars are exported, generally to places like India, the Caribbean and South Africa, where they are kept for much longer. And that two-year breakeven will only get better as EV batteries become more efficient, and the energy used to make them will become cleaner.

Up to this point, this was just a normal story of an industry-sponsored report using dodgy assumptions to paint a pessimistic view of the potential of EVs in the fight against climate change - and being caught and put straight. To anyone following the subject over the past few years it was boringly familiar - if anything it was quite heartening: the report's authors no longer dared to fix the figure so grossly as to claim that EVs are worse for the climate than petrol or diesel cars - as so many fossil fuel shills continue to do - they only claimed it would take 48,000 miles to break even.

But then things started to get weird.

The report that was being quoted bore the imprint of a company called Clarendon Communications. It was not a name I knew. I wondered what expertise they had? Who were they? So, as the working week wound down, beer in hand, I had a poke around on the internet - as one does.

The Clarendon Communications website lists no team members. I've seen a few PR company websites in my time and, without exception, they all tout the wisdom and experience of the senior team members. Then, under clients, the website prominently displays the logos of Aston Martin and Bosch, two of the companies whose logos are on the EV report.

No team, but two great clients. Strange.

Next, I visited the company's LinkedIn page. Another alarm bell: no staff. You can't stop staff linking to a corporate LinkedIn page, so no staff links generally means... no staff. Very strange.

Off to Companies House, where it's the work of 90 seconds to find the names of directors of any UK company. Here you go: Clarendon Communications has one director, Rebecca Caroline Stephens. Most PR companies have several directors - more strange.

Back to LinkedIn. No Rebecca Caroline Stephens. Plenty of fabulously capable Rebecca Stephens's, but none of them look like the one we are looking for. And here's another warning sign. Clarendon Communications was set up early this year.

Until such time as the Clarendon Communications twitter feed is taken down (which you have to assume happens pretty soon) you should enjoy browsing the list of accounts they follow. No spoilers, it's fun. Actually don't worry, Lukas Bergmann took a screenshot (the internet says thanks Lukas!)

Now, back to LinkedIn. In its ten months of existence, the mysterious Clarendon Communications has only posted half a dozen times. And the second-last one caught my eye:

There it is: James M Stephens, Director Global Government & Corporate Affairs at Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd. Stephens. Of course it could just be a coincidence that the head of government affairs at Aston Martin and the sole director of the PR company putting out misinformation on EVs on behalf of the company share the same last name. But it doesn't seem very likely, does it? So I took to Twitter, and shared my suspicions.

The next day, a lazy Saturday afternoon. I could barely believe what I seem to have discovered. I mean, Aston Martin is a brand I admire. I've watched all the Bond films. I've wanted to own one! Could they be this brazen, and this bad at hiding their tracks?

But it could still have been a coincidence, right, Stephens and Stephens? There was one more place to check: Her Majesty's Land Registry. For ￡3, you can find out who owns any address in the UK. I typed in the address provided by Companies House for Rebecca Caroline Stephens, and bingo! Jointly owned by Rebecca Caroline Stephens and James Michael Stephens.

My role in all this, I hope is drawing to a close. I am not a journalist, I am an analyst, advisor and investor. There is a rumour on Twitter that Rebecca Stephens is a nurse. I don't do Facebook, and even if I did, I would leave it to others to check. Frankly, if it's true, I feel sorry she has been dragged into this; I would rather thank her for her service in her professional life than cause her more stress.

All I wanted to do at the start of this was to cut through some of the myths and misinformation about EVs because they slow down attempts to address climate change, they cause public money to be wasted, and they destroy good investments. And because they are just... wrong.

There are still plenty of unanswered questions, which I hope others will pursue:

1. Who actually wrote the Clarendon Communications report? For all its dodgy figures, it took a team of people a few months to put together. There were drafts, authors, layout people, photo rights to clear, emails to sponsors, discussions about the timing of release. How extensive was the deception?
2. What did senior management at Aston Martin know? This was a sock puppet PR company in the name of the wife (presumably) of the company's Director of Global Government and Corporate Affairs. Aston Martin is a quoted company. There are governance rules. Were they broken?
3. Were stock market rules broken?
4. The MP for Warwick & Leamington, Matt Western, wrote a foreword for the Clarendon Communications report. He is the constituency MP for Gaydon, the site of Aston Martin's HQ and a largest plant, as well as Chair of the All Party Group on EVs, It is entirely appropriate for him to support his largest local employer and to fight for local jobs, so no blame should adhere to him. But will Matt Western now be issuing a statement distancing himself from the report and its dodgy figures?
5. What did the other organisations listed in the Clarendon Communications report know? We need to hear from Bosch, Honda UK, Leaders Live (whoever they are), the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership, McLaren Group, Optare (where former Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer is now Chair), and the Renewable Transport Fuel Association. Were they all in on this, or was it just Aston Martin?
6. Were the journalists who covered the report in on this too, or were they fooled? Did they receive the report directly from Aston Martin and know that Clarendon Communications was a facade? Or was it distributed to them via Clarendon Communications and they did not undertake the basic checks that I did?
7. Will the media outlets which carried the "50,000 miles to emissions breakeven" story now issue corrections?
8. What will the reaction of Aston Martin's institutional investors be? Asset managers and owners want us to believe they have started paying real attention to ESG. So will this sort of behaviour by a major car company have consequences or not? Invesco, Fidelity, Vanguard - what are you going to do?

Now, a few closing thoughts. This is all very sad for Aston Martin. One of the great British brands, the company has always struggled with economic cycles. Sold in 2007 by Ford and Jaguar to a Kuwait-led consortium, it was forced to raise further investment at a lower valuation in 2012, before its triumphant stock market debut in October 2018 at an astronomical ￡4.3 billion valuation.

Since then its share price has collapsed. In April this year, just as the Covid pandemic was laying waste to the global economy, Aston Martin was bailed out by Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, who led a consortium which invested $322 million in the company for a 25% share; Stroll became the company's chairman. Shortly afterwards, Daimler became potentially Aston Martin's second-largest investor, with a stake that could grow to 20% by 2023.

I think it is safe to say Stroll is no fan of EVs. After all, he owns a Formula 1 team. And shortly after his investment, Aston Martin pushed back until beyond 2025 its plans to produce an all-electric Rapide-E and to re-launch Lagonda as an all-electric brand. The latest Bond film, No Time to Die (whose launch has been delayed due to the pandemic) was initially intended to showcase an electric Aston Martin. No longer.

If you squint, you may be able to see the faint outline of Aston Martin's climate strategy among the co-sponsors (if indeed that's what they were) of the Clarendon Communications report. Bosch markets a range of fuel cell solutions for transportation. Honda is one of the few car companies still touting a hydrogen fuel cell car. Then there is the Renewable Transport Fuel Association. And the text of the report contains no fewer than 23 mentions of e-fuels: synthetic fuels made using low-carbon power. So there you have it: Aston Martin's "anything but electrification" strategy.

It is profoundly misguided. I have written elsewhere (ad nauseam) about how hydrogen fuel cells are no the solution for cars, probably not for any sort of transportation. The sheer complexity of the vehicle and the 50% wind-to-wheel efficiency penalty make them a non-starter. E-fuels would be even more inefficient and costly - their production requires adding process stages beyond hydrogen, including some way of sourcing the carbon molecules required. As for biofuels, is society really going to allow large areas of land to be dedicated to their production, just because a bunch of rich boy-racers like their cars to go "vroom vroom" instead of "swish swish"?

Anything-but-electrification is a highway to oblivion for Aston Martin, as it would be for any car company. I feel desperately sorry for Aston Martin's employees. They continue to produce a magnificent product, but one designed for a different era. They have been tragically let down by management, too focused perhaps on the IPO and hugely miscalculating the speed of the low-carbon transition.

Imagine the panic in the board room at Aston Martin when the government suddenly announced that the UK's ban on the sale of petrol and diesel cars would be brought forward to 2030. It was only in 2018 that Michael Gove, as Environment Secretary, announced the government's intention to ban internal combustion vehicles by 2040. In February this year it was announced this would be brought forward to 2035. Then this month, as part of his 10-point plan for a Green Industrial Revolution, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the end date for sales of new petrol and diesel cars would be 2030. Having cancelled its EV programme earlier this year, Aston Martin was planning to start selling EVs some time near 2030, not stop selling petrol cars. You can see why management might be under enormous pressure, why it might have cut corners in its desperation to challenge the 2030 deadline before it beds in politically and is set in stone.

Finally, there is a reason why the "50,000-miles-to-emissions-breakeven" story (and all the others like it) was taken up so gleefully by the UK press. The traditionalist wing of the Conservative Party is deeply unhappy with the leadership's lurch towards Net Zero and the Green Industrial Revolution - it rubs their libertarian and corporatist tendencies the wrong way in equal measure.

The old men of the Global Warming Policy Foundation have been on the warpath against any sort of action on climate change for decades. They are losing and they know it - leaders of 75% of the global economy set to announce a net zero target at COP26 in Glasgow - but they still have a shocking level of influence on editors and media owners.

That's why it is so important to win the culture war, as well as the war of data, the war of analysis, the war of policy design. Auke's demolition of the figures in the Clarendon Communications report is critical. But so is flipping over of the stones of #Astongate, and shining light on whatever nasties come wriggling into the light.

Selah.