I just caught this BMW advert, narrated by Donald Sutherland, during the Grand Prix:
Pretty advert, sure, but it’s that last card, the tagline, that annoys me. Any GCSE student – let alone a copywriter at a major agency, working on a huge campaign for a massive client – could tell you that you can’t say “less emissions”. It should be “fewer emissions”, as “emissions” is a countable noun. I’d be perfectly happy with “less gunk emitted”. Even “less gas” would be fine. But absolutely not “less emissions”.
That said, Fowler says that
less can be idiomatically used with plural nouns when these denote something closer to an amount than a numerical quantity, as with distances, periods of time, ages, and sums of money: less than 5 miles to go | less than six weeks | children less than three years old | less than £100
In this context, I suppose, “emissions” is denoting the total amount of gunk being emitted, so this could, feasibly, be correct. I’m not convinced, though – it just seems sloppy to me, using ungrammatical English to fit the meter of the tagline.
The Engine Room (a blog about language, not cars) has an interesting discussion about the same thing…