The What Car? Green Car of the Year goes to the Volvo S40 1.6D DRIVe. Photograph: Amy Stillman

The Volvo S40 1.6D DRIVe has been named Green Car of the Year by UK automotive magazine What Car? at an award ceremony attended by the mayor of London on Monday night.

The annual award was presented by London Mayor Boris Johnson, who praised the Volvo S40 1.6D DRIVe for its pioneering Start/Stop technology, and it’s extremely low CO2 emissions of 104g/km.

“I just want to say how vitally important this is,” said Mayor Johnson. “ What you are doing is promoting a technology which I think will be of indispensable importance for our city, and of course you are playing your part in saving the planet, and saving it in a way that is
technologically optimistic,” he added.

The Volvo S40 DRIVe beat the BMW 118d and the Renault Megane in the Small Family category and then raced ahead to victory in the final competition, beating the Audi A8 and MINI Cooper S for the “What Car? Green Car of the Year” title.

With fuel consumption of only 3.9 litres per 100km, judges commended the S40 DRIVe for maintaining shockingly low carbon emissions while still relying on a diesel engine.

Stuart Kerr, Volvo's Regional President of Europe said: “We are pleasantly surprised about winning in the sense that [the focus of environmentally-friendly vehicle development] has very much been driven by an electrification programme, but the car does what it
should do, and I am incredibly pleased that that’s been recognized.”

Peter Rask, managing director of Volvo Cars UK told The London File that winning the award “shows that Volvo is one of the
brands that has a future.”

“We’ve been working on this for more than  20 years, and it just shows where we are today,” said Rask. “It’s a step towards the future of making cleaner and cleaner motor cars.”

But environmentally conscious consumers may find it difficult to afford the S40 DRIVe, at a standard rate of £17,500.

Rask points to the scrappage scheme introduced by the Government in mid-May as a way to cut down the price. The scheme allows car owners to trade in 10-year-old motors and receive £2,000 in return, which can contribute towards the cost of a new car.

Volvo Cars has recently partnered with electricity company Vattenfall in Sweden, and plans to mass produce electrical vehicles by 2012.