Environmental initiative

Audi is well known for producing increasingly efficient vehicles as well as the company’s pioneering work in e-mobility and other forms of alternate fuel sources. Now Audi’s logistics department has also demonstrated its environmental credentials, ensuring that all rail transport for AUDI AG in Germany is CO2-free. This makes Audi the first company in Germany to organise its logistics operations by rail to be completely CO2-neutral. The move will reduce CO2 emissions by more than 13,000 tons each year, achieving an important milestone along the way to CO2- neutral production.

Audi has been using environmentally friendly “DBeco plus” rail transport for its cars since 2010. Since 2010, the so-called ‘green trains’ have been traveling from Ingolstadt to the North Sea port of Emden and since 2012, Audi vehicles have also been transported from the plant in Neckarsulm using the ‘green trains’. To date, this has resulted in 1,600,000 vehicles being transported and 63,000 tons of CO2 emissions avoided.

With the changeover to rail transport, Audi is pursuing its goal of making its car manufacturing completely CO2-neutral in the foreseeable future. In 2014, Audi was the first company to have its CO2 footprint certified according to the worldwide standard ISO 14064, and uses the results of that certification to continually derive measures to reduce its environmental footprint. The company has analysed in detail the emissions during all of an automobile’s lifecycle, and then derived suitable measures to ensure further reductions.