DOI: 10.3303/CET2188181

Paper Received: 13 June 2021; Revised: 26 September 2021; Accepted: 6 October 2021
Please cite this article as: Tóth Á., Suta A., 2021, Global Sustainability Reporting in the Automotive Industry via the eXtensible Business
Reporting Language, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 88, 1087-1092 DOI:10.3303/CET2188181

CHEMICAL ENGINEERING TRANSACTIONS

VOL. 88, 2021

A publication of

The Italian Association
of Chemical Engineering
Online at www.cetjournal.it

Guest Editors: Petar S. Varbanov, Yee Van Fan, Jiří J. Klemeš

ISBN 978-88-95608-86-0; ISSN 2283-9216

Global Sustainability Reporting in the Automotive Industry via
the eXtensible Business Reporting Language

Árpád Tóth*, Alex Suta
Szechenyi Istvan University, Vehicle Industry Research Center, H-9026 Győr, Egyetem Sq. 1, IS-201
totha@ga.sze.hu

Sustainability measurement has become one of the most important topics for automotive manufacturers. The
financial reporting practice has been faced with an increased digitization and standardization process, which
was enabled by the either voluntary or required implementation of the eXtensible Business Reporting Language
(XBRL) platform. The obligatory adaption appeared in European legislation, which covers both financial, and
non-financial information. In the current study, we have made a comparison of the most significant European
and American automakers' sustainability reports data content to utilize the sustainability XBRL taxonomy
adaptation. Using literature, the development of disclosure requirements was reviewed, following which the
adaptation to global sustainability standards (GRI, SASB) in reporting was examined from a qualitative point of
view, using a text mining methodology. It has been concluded that by the biggest automotive manufacturers the
conditions are currently met to a limited extent, but the most significant obstacle is the lack of linking
sustainability information to financial impacts. If the financial regulations require OEMs to adapt, and potentially
disclose negative information (such as pollution data, penalties) may negatively affect investor perception.
Based on the review XBRL is capable to become a global standard, however, reported contents should be
carefully audited and linked to objectively verifiable financial data to provide relevant information to investors,
decision-makers.

1. Introduction

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) information are facing increasing use by the capital markets and
other stakeholder groups. Today it means a great effort for organizations to ensure that ESG disclosures are
meeting quality standards (AICPA and CIMA, 2021a).
To fulfill disclosure requirements, organizations’ need arises of establishing effective governance and internal
control of sustainability-related operations. Companies need to conduct internal assessments (on financial
materiality or risks) to determine the topics in sustainability that are important to the organization and other
stakeholders, such as its customers or investors. In the past years companies, especially automotive Original
Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) became more alert based on environmental concerns. To fulfill requirements
raised by different stakeholders they started to comply with some of the proposed standards that offered a
systematic approach to presenting sustainability information. Despite the wider appearance of sustainability
standards in 2010-2015, Szennay et al. (2019) addressed the intentional misuse due to gaining stakeholder
preference based on a non-existent sustainability-related performance. Kravchenko et al. (2019) identified over
270 performance indicators available for the sustainability measurement of manufacturing companies, where
several gaps occur in standardization. While the main purpose of such standards is providing a higher standard
in information quality (reducing the possibility of abusing minimum requirements), at the same time enhancing
comparability, these criteria are often violated. While the issues of sustainability information quality are widely
addressed in the literature, studies mainly focus on business models and internal processes of sustainability
measurement. The perceived importance of sustainability disclosures from the corporate side was often
analyzed in the form of questionnaires and interviews; but less reliant on corporate reports and research aiming
to standardize and automate evaluation processes. This study addresses the evaluation of the environmentally
sustainable performance of the biggest automotive OEMs, being a practical issue of stakeholders such as
shareholders or analysts. As confirmed by Ordonez-Ponce and Khare (2021), GRI standards offer a capable

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solution to the global comparability of sustainability information in the automotive sector. In the study
sustainability standard systems used from 2015 through 2020 additionally were reviewed by a text mining
methodology. In that time interval, the use of GRI and SASB standards in disclosures was measured
automatically, which serves as the novelty of the research to enable an objective comparison between years
and companies. The validity of the research topic is supported by ongoing standard-setting discussions and
regulatory activity aiming to solve the current issue with the use of the eXtensible Business Reporting Language
(XBRL).

2. Development of regulatory sustainability disclosure requirements: the EU and the US

In the US sustainability reporting has historically taken place outside of the obligatory submissions to the
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). However, there is an increasing interest by investors in the
disclosure of ESG information in SEC submissions, including proxy statements, annual reports, and quarterly
reports (AICPA and CIMA, 2021b). Companies have more possibilities of disclosing this kind of non-financial
information. Aligned with the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures
(TCFD), the types of reports include financial filings, annual-, integrated-, and sustainability reports. Despite
possibilities, on average, information aligned with the recommended disclosures was over four times more likely
to be disclosed in sustainability reports than in financial filings or annual reports (AICPA and CIMA, 2021b). The
TCFD recommended over 60 ESG disclosures in the main areas of Governance, Strategy (with a focus on
environmental resiliency), Risk management, and Metrics and targets (TCFD, 2020). According to the regulation
issued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), all listed companies should disclose certain
environmental information in their annual filings, as well as plants that emit carbon above a threshold amount to
report GHG emission facts to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) annually (Cong et al., 2020).
In the European Union, the responsible organization for the development of the draft standards is the European
Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG), which has started preparatory work for a revision of the Non-
Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) active since 2018 (Lai and Stacchezzini, 2021). At the request of the
European Commission, EFRAG published technical recommendations as of April 2021 (EFRAG, 2021) and a
roadmap for the development of EU sustainability reporting standards. Before adopting any, the Commission
will consult the Member States Expert Group on Sustainable Finance and seek the opinion of the European
Securities and Markets Authority and other regulatory bodies (European Commission, 2021). The proposals of
the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation to create a new Sustainability Standards
Board are relevant in this context, as is the work already carried out by initiatives including the Global Reporting
Initiative (GRI) and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB). Standards use different reporting
processes, as well as different approaches to materiality. While the guidance is available individually, there is
no single recommended way to use the two sets of standards together (GRI and SASB, 2020).
The content of sustainability information published in companies' annual reports is currently subject to minimum
regulations, but various standards and guidelines (e.g. GRI, SASB) are available to help businesses achieve
quality information. This information is playing an increasingly important role for regulators, owners/investors,
and other stakeholders, due to climate change and other environmental factors. In the future, various emission
restrictions may also pose a financial risk to businesses. With the increase and standardization of reporting
obligations, the ability of companies to mask negative information decreases. In addition to improving the quality
of sustainability information, the current transformation also supports digitization. Electronic financial reporting
has undergone significant development, with XBRL becoming the leading platform today. XBRL is a freely
accessible, international framework designed to increase the comparability of business information. Using it,
difficulties arising from custom and fragmented reporting can be overcome. In the EU, the European Single
Electronic Format (ESEF) reports, building on the technology of XBRL have become mandatory for listed
companies for reporting their financial information, starting from 1 January 2020. Many ESEF financial reports
have been yet published, and the used XBRL format is on the roadmap for the development of sustainability
reporting of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). This way sustainability reports will be
published in a uniform, online, and machine-readable XBRL format as planned from the 2023 business year.
This is a significant step forward in the development of the XBRL reporting language, with the framework being
used by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) since 2005 gaining robustness on a global scale.
While technological requirements of implementation are already met, there is a missing link in wide-range
regulatory issues considering reporting disclosures.

3. Methodology

In the current study, an automated content analysis was carried out based on the most recent five years (2016-
2020) of sustainability reports in unstructured pdf formats. Data were collected from official websites of the six

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most significant automotive OEMs in Europe and the US (3-3) by 2021 net sales revenues (Statista, 2018).
During data gathering, some characteristics in reporting practices, and changes between reporting years were
seen. In 2020 Volkswagen (VW) started to use a separate document with references to GRI standards. In 2020
Daimler disclosed separate SASB and TCFD reference tables that highlight pages of the sustainability report.
On January 19, 2021, the merger between Peugeot S.A. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V. was complete that
lead to the creation of Stellantis N.V. (FCA Group, 2021). Ford provided several documents aiming to reference
content indices to the main texts of sustainability, and several other corporate reports and statements found
online. Only in the most recent reporting period, Ford presented 9 additional reference tables to the main
Integrated Report, containing external links. At the same time, General Motors disclosed in-text reference tables
for GRI, SASB, and the TCFD standards, referencing the main text. In Table 2, the column indicating the number
of disclosures contain sustainability disclosures (such as “GRI 305-1: Direct (Scope 1) GHG emissions”, or “TR-
AU-250a.3: Number of vehicles recalled”) served as the basis of frequency analysis. The introduced criterion
was a direct matching of the main text with the sustainability disclosure codes (such as “305-1” or “TR-AU-250”).

Table 1: Used sample of corporate reports

Region Referenced document Years
Compliance with
standards (2020)

Source

EU
BMW Sustainable Value Report
BMW Integrated Group Report

2016-2019
2020

GRI, TCFD BMW (2021)

EU Daimler Sustainability Report 2016-2020 GRI, SASB, TCFD Daimler (2021)
EU Volkswagen Group Sustainability Report 2016-2020 GRI VW (2021)

US/EU
FCA Group Sustainability Report
Stellantis Sustainability Report

2016-2020
2020

GRI, SASB, TCFD,
ISO26000

Stellantis (2021)

US
Ford Sustainability Report
Ford Integrated Report

2016/17-2019/20
2020/21

GRI, SASB, TCFD Ford (2021)

US General Motors Sustainability Report 2016-2020 GRI, SASB, TCFD GM (2021)

Table 2: Sustainability standards and disclosure used in Natural Language Processing

Sustainability standard category Number of standards Number of disclosures

GRI 100 Series: Universal 2 59
GRI 200 Series: Economic Topics 6 13
GRI 300 Series: Environmental Topics 8 32
GRI 400 Series: Social Topics 19 40
SASB Automobiles 1 14 + 5 (simplified)

To achieve certain automated tasks in qualitative content analysis, methodological bits of prior literature were
used. Fiandrino and Tonelli (2021) carried out a text mining analysis in official NFRD documents that are applied
mandatorily by European listed companies, to understand the main topics covered. Ning et al. (2021) identified
topics as part of their text mining methodology using GRI standards, as well as the availability of GRI indicators.
Prior findings of Tóth et al. (2021) were used regarding the handling and directed topic retrieval in unstructured
file formats. For the Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, the Provalis WordStat software was used
(Provalis, 2021). The content analysis steps included (1) textual data retrieval from sustainability reports, (2)
processing and tokenization of data, (3) quantitative content analysis (word and phrase frequencies, topic
generation using factor analysis) based on the defined categorization of standard categories as in Table 1, (4)
observation of sustainability disclosure occurrence in main report body text, (5) additional content analysis of
GRI reference tables; (6) comparison between years and companies.

4. Results

Although there are no standardized reporting requirements of reports, and there is no obligation to prepare these
reports in a machine-readable format, NLP has reached a technological level where keyword frequencies in
unstructured datasets are measurable and suitable for analysis. Based on the automated content analysis of
the six automotive sustainability reports, it can be concluded that the observed companies have different
reporting practices. To evaluate results in the compliance of disclosures to standards, following Provalis (2010)
we found that indicators of keyword frequencies and the TF*IDF (term frequency weighted by inverse document
frequency) weighing indicators were used. TF*IDF indicates, that the higher occurrence of a word in documents
will give a higher term frequency (TF), but the less occurrence of a word in documents will result in higher

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importance (IDF) for that keyword search in a particular document (Qaiser and Ali, 2018). Outlier values of
TF*IDF might indicate the observation to be unique, and not typical for all reporters.
Table 3 presents the annual changes in the reported disclosure compliance, in an aggregated format by
standard categories. For each company group between the years 2016-2020, the keyword frequencies (columns
3-7) and TF*IDF indicators (columns 8-12) were presented. Sustainability disclosures were categorized
according to the GRI standard sets as in Table 2. Colors green and red were used by column to highlight the
highest absolute values. When observing a sustainability standard sets’ keyword frequency, the included

disclosure identifiers were retrieved from the corporate reports’ main texts (as in Notes to Table 2). For instance,
in its year 2018 sustainability report, Volkswagen group mentioned disclosures of the GRI 100 category on 176
occasions, while tackled environmental disclosures (GRI 300) only 41 times. According to the table, there is no
clear trend in reporting practices, however, some drastic changes (sudden change from 0 to n, or n to 0) can be
observed. At the same time, the TF*IDF values indicate how well certain disclosures were reported by all
companies in the single year observed. Where the indicator takes a high value, the term frequency for the certain
company is relatively uncommon, compared to others in the year observed. In the Year column, asterisks
indicate a change in methodology, e.g. the start of using indicator/reference tables separated from or integrated
into the observed sustainability report.

Table 3: Disclosure frequency in observed report main texts by standards, companies, and years (2016-20)

Keyword frequency TF*IDF

Company group Year
GRI
100

GRI
200

GRI
300

GRI
400

SASB
TR-
AU

GRI
100

GRI
200

GRI
300

GRI
400

SASB
TR-AU

VW (2021) 2016* 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2017 184 13 32 34 0 36.5 3.2 4.3 6.7 0
2018 176 20 41 53 0 34.9 4.9 5.5 10.5 0
2019* 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0.1 0 0
2020 2 0 6 1 0 0.4 0 0.8 0.2 0

BMW (2021) 2016* 0 1 2 0 1 0 0.2 0.3 0 0.4
2017 187 43 63 78 1 37.1 10.6 8.5 15.5 0.4
2018 47 6 36 47 0 9.3 1.5 4.8 9.3 0
2019 47 5 33 66 0 9.3 1.2 4.4 13.1 0
2020 29 9 50 58 1 5.8 2.2 6.7 11.5 0.4

Daimler (2021) 2016 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2017 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2018* 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2019 107 11 25 43 0 21.2 2.7 3.4 8.5 0
2020 89 12 28 44 8 17.7 3 3.8 8.7 3.2

Stellantis (2021) 2016 1 0 4 5 0 0.2 0 0.5 1 0
2017* 1 1 2 1 0 0.2 0.2 0.3 0.2 0
2018 143 11 48 64 0 28.4 2.7 6.5 12.7 0
2019 56 12 35 56 0 11.1 3 4.7 11.1 0
2020 62 9 27 27 23 12.3 2.2 3.6 5.4 9.2

Ford (2021) 2016 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0.1 0 0
2017 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0.1 0 0
2018 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0.8
2019 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0.4
2020 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0.8

GM (2021) 2016* 4 0 0 2 0 0.8 0 0 0.4 0
2017 118 11 27 36 9 23.4 2.7 3.6 7.1 3.6
2018 119 11 33 42 18 23.6 2.7 4.4 8.3 7.2
2019 138 13 44 50 20 27.4 3.2 5.9 9.9 8
2020 138 13 42 50 16 27.4 3.2 5.7 9.9 6.4

It can be observed that in more cases methodological changes were implemented, such as the integration or
separation of the fact sheets, serving as the proof of compliance, from main texts of sustainability reports. To
filter the distortion effect of such changes the same NLP methodology was implemented on the latest 2020 GRI
reference tables. This information serves as an addition to the reported sustainability information’s GRI

compliance evaluation. Although companies did not provide a systematic approach to reporting compliance to

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certain standards in an integrated format to sustainability reports, the openly accessible GRI reference tables
were analyzed as the next step.

Table 4: Disclosure frequency in additional documentation

Keyword frequency
Company group Year GRI 100 GRI 200 GRI 300 GRI 400
VW (2021) 2020 139 9 13 23
BMW (2021) 2020 20 3 8 11
Daimler (2021) 2020 151 26 41 53
Stellantis (2021) 2020 59 6 25 21
Ford (2021) 2020/21 142 19 40 49
GM (2021) 2020 138 13 35 48

In Table 4, the TF*IDF columns were not presented as it took 0 values in all rows, therefore all standard
categories were addressed by all six companies, but with a varying disclosure frequency of GRI categories.
Disclosures associated with GRI 100 standards represented the most entries, which can be partly explained by
the highest number of disclosures contained by the standards. Despite the total number of GRI 300:
Environmental disclosures (n=32) and GRI 400 Series: Social disclosures (n=40), these categories were greatly
underrepresented. In Table 5 the most frequent word pairs of the 2020 GRI reference tables of all companies
were extracted, based on factor analysis by paragraphs. In the process, phrases exceeding the TF*IDF average
score (12.2) were marked as outliers and removed. It can be seen that the most frequent phrases were closely
connected to management concerns and compliance with legal obligations (GRI 100). Therefore, topics like
Climate change, GHG emissions, or Energy consumption were less discussed from a frequency aspect.

Table 5: Most frequent phrases (2-5 word combinations) based on automatic text processing

Phrase Frequency
% of
companies

TF*IDF

Management approach 338 100 0
Human rights 217 100 0
Evaluation of the management approach 150 100 0
Explanation of the material topic 148 100 0
Corporate governance 101 83.33 8
Supply chain 97 100 0
Health and safety 82 100 0
Occupational health and safety 51 100 0
Climate change 43 83.33 3.4
GHG emissions 38 100 0
Highest governance body 37 100 0
Energy consumption 34 100 0
GRI standards 31 100 0

5. Conclusions

Although the biggest automotive OEMs put an increasing effort into the integration of several sustainability
reports (in some cases up to 9), the overview and inclusion in automated analysis require manual intervention
and evaluation of compliance. Precise determination of compliance can only be achieved with the apprehension
of cross-referenced standard tables and indices following an unstructured format. With the approaching
emergence of XBRL-based reporting, it is the basis of comparability that such references of different standard
systems will be either linked to each data series as “facts” or a similar technical solution. Another possibility is
the centralized creation of a new standard set inspired from such predecessors as GRI or SASB, which are,
considering the decades-long operation of their institutions, rather unlikely. The research contributes to the
literature of novel text mining applications in industry-specific sustainability reporting practices. The study
advocates the use of TF*IDF keyword frequency indicator that bears further possibilities of integration into
existing text mining models. Based on the findings of the study it is proposed that companies should apply XBRL
as a sustainability reporting platform and focus on relevant and fact-based content reporting.

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Acknowledgements

The research presented in this paper was carried out as part of the “Talent Management in Autonomous Vehicle
Control Technologies (EFOP-3.6.3-VEKOP-16-2017-00001)” project in the framework of the New Széchenyi
Plan. The completion of this project is funded by the European Union and co-financed by the European Social
Fund.

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