EU’s TCMV votes to adopt key elements to Real Driving Emissions test procedure

31 October 2015

The EU’s Technical Committee—Motor Vehicles (TCMV) agreed on the RDE emission limits (conformity factors) and the dates of applicability. These were missing from the text adopted earlier this year. The new RDE test will have a binding impact on the type approvals issued by the national type approval authority (TAA) from September 2017 for all newly approved types of vehicles and from September 2019 for all new vehicles.

Member States agreed that car manufacturers must reduce the divergence between the regulatory limit that is tested in laboratory conditions and the values of the RDE procedure when the car is driven by a real driver on a real road (the so-called “conformity factor”) in two steps:

• in a first step, car manufacturers will have to bring down the discrepancy to a conformity factor of maximum 2.1 (110%) for new models by September 2017 (for new vehicles by September 2019);
• in a second step, this discrepancy will be brought down to a factor of 1.5 (50%), taking account of technical margins of error, by January 2020 for all new models (by January 2021 for all new vehicles).

The draft comitology regulation will now be sent to the European Parliament and the Council for regulatory scrutiny.

Source: European Commission