Nice carbon calculator, if you can find it
by Simon Handby in Your car on 31.07.07
The government is doing its best to come up with tools we can use to learn about our effect on the environment, and hopefully minimise it. Back in June, DEFRA launched a great carbon calculator for the home. In mid-July it followed up with an entertaining environmental game.
Not to be outdone, the Department for Transport (DfT) has teamed up with What Car to launch a green guide for car buyers. It’s a useful site which lets you find the cars from among 14 different categories that have the lowest CO2 emissions, and offers advice on how to drive ‘greenly’.
It could prove a useful green motoring resource, but in these early days the DfT still has a little work to do on the site’s accessibility. Motoring websites reporting on the launch, such as Autobloggreen, are occasionally missing the final slash from the address http://www.dft.gov.uk/ActOnCO2/, causing visitors to arrive at a page not found message. Embarrassingly, What Car misspells the link “actionCO2”, to the same effect.
It’s a simple matter to redirect people missing off the slash or mistakenly typing “action”, and we wouldn’t be surprised to find both mistakes catered for by the time you read this post. It’s a bit of a shame, however, and might explain why we haven’t seen the site mentioned in the mainstream press. Today’s DfT press release, which also misses the final slash, won’t help matters.
:UPDATE - We’ve just spotted that the DfT has fixed the issue with the slash. It’ll be interesting to see if mainstream websites pick up the DfT’s news release now the links in it work. Meanwhile, What Car tells us it has fixed the misspelling in its links, and its site should be updated soon.
I’ve had several goes to find the car comparison after seeing an advert in the paper. I simply get the page unrecognised message each time….!!
26.08.2008 at 11:52 am