What is OBFCM data? The fuel meters behind real-world car figures

OBFCM stands for on-board fuel and energy consumption monitoring. Since 2021, every new car and van sold in the EU must record its lifetime fuel use and distance travelled. For plug-in hybrids it also records how far the car drove with the engine off, with the engine running while the battery was being used, and how much grid electricity went into the battery.

How the data reaches the public

Carmakers and national authorities send the readings to the European Commission. The European Environment Agency publishes them each year with a one-year lag, as a raw file with one row per car and an aggregate file per manufacturer, under a CC BY 4.0 licence. The 2024 release covers cars first registered between 2021 and 2024 in the EU-27, Norway and Iceland. Vehicle identification numbers are not published.

What PluginRisk does with it

We read the full 2024 raw file — 10,810,654 rows — and group plug-in hybrids by make and model. You can read the exact steps in our methodology and download the result as CSV.

Limits

  • Readings are lifetime totals, so newer cars carry less weight.
  • The UK is not part of the dataset; UK models are usually the same cars sold in the EU.
  • Some manufacturers report fields inconsistently. Where a model's engine-off distance does not fit its fuel use, we do not show it.
Sources