Volkswagen is on a journey to make emissions-free mobility accessible to everyone through infrastructure investments worldwide and the reveal of their first all-electric SUV. But with other automotive companies heavily promoting their own electric vehicles, we needed to do something unique to bring VW’s sustainability efforts to the forefront.

So, we set out to design a website that’s as carbon-efficient as Volkswagen’s all-new electric vehicle.

The internet has a surprisingly large carbon footprint and generates around 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, a 2020 survey showed that 73% of people were entirely unaware of this fact.

But the less data embedded in online media, the less energy needed to transfer it over the web, resulting in a smaller carbon footprint.

So, we did the unthinkable for a car brand. We reduced Volkswagen’s website to almost nothing by removing all images and colour, creating the first sustainable web experience for an automotive company. This brought awareness to Volkswagen’s new all-electric SUV, while educating site visitors about the internet’s carbon footprint.

While 73% of people surveyed were unaware of the internet’s carbon impact, when asked, 81% said they wanted to try to reduce their digital carbon footprint. As well, a segmentation study identified that Volkswagen’s core audience believes in collective action for the common good.

So, we hijacked Volkswagen’s website and turned it into a visually disruptive and more sustainable browsing experience. This did far more than just talk about Volkswagen’s commitment to sustainability – it created a tangible demonstration of it, while encouraging site visitors to learn about their own digital carbon footprint.

We removed every image from Volkswagen’s website and replaced them with over 1.5 million ASCII characters, meticulously coded to create the illusion of car photography. No JPEGs. No PNGs. Only live text used to mimic photographic light and shadow. This drastically reduced the amount of embedded data, transforming an industry-standard website into a significantly more sustainable one.

Then, we removed all colour, in favour of a stark black and white palette inspired by the energy efficiency of dark mode. We also applied a similar methodology behind the scenes, by streamlining code, stripping down JavaScript, subsetting fonts, and using lighter frameworks.

While design choices can impact usability, emotion, and aesthetics, our website transformation demonstrates that design can impact sustainability too.

The result? A website that’s 99% cleaner than over 2 million sites tested – generating only 0.022g of CO2 per page view (versus the average of 1.76g). This was validated via a full manual assessment by Website Carbon (third-party experts in digital sustainability), who factored in the proportion of desktop and mobile users, the carbon factor for national grid energy, and data centre/user locations. Based on 100,000 page views, our site now saves over 171,800g of CO2 per month.

With coverage in 90+ news and media outlets in just three weeks, not only did we cut through the industry noise to promote Volkswagen’s all-new electric vehicle, but now site visitors can read all of VW’s sustainability-focussed content the way it was meant to be seen—in the most carbon-efficient way possible.