EU adopts draft regulation to certify CO2 emissions from new trucks
16 May 2017
At the 67th meeting of the European Commission’s Technical Committee—Motor Vehicles (TCMV) held on May 11, 2017, the Commission and the Member States adopted a Draft Commission Regulation that will require truck manufacturers to measure the fuel consumption and CO2 emissions of their vehicles using the VECTO simulation tool, starting from 2019.
Under the draft regulation, manufacturers would have to determine the fuel consumption and CO2 emissions from new trucks, according to harmonized and certified procedures. The fuel consumption and CO2 figures would be publicly available, and would assist truck buyers in making their choices. However, the raw input data used in VECTO would be stored by manufacturers in an encrypted file that would be available to the approval authority and the Commission upon request, but would not be available to the public. The cryptographic hash of the record file would be included in the certificate of conformity of each vehicle that is sold or registered.
The draft regulation does not include any CO2 emission limits or any mandates to reduce emissions.
The requirements will be phased-in over the period from January 2019 through July 2020, depending on the type of the truck and its registration and production date. This regulation will apply to vehicles category N2 with a reference mass over 7,500 kg and to all vehicles category N3.
After the adoption of the draft regulation, truck manufacturers expressed concerns as to whether the proposed lead time between the entry into force of the regulation and the start of the CO2 declaration is sufficient to perform the necessary certification activities.
The T&E Group called on European Commission and Member States to agree, in the second VECTO package due this year, to guarantee that third parties—research institutes, fleets, transport companies, NGOs—will have access to the raw VECTO input, to ensure that the official fuel consumption figures can be cross-checked through independent testing. Since VECTO is only a simulation tool, the second package must also include on-road fuel consumption testing, said T&E.
VECTO (Vehicle Energy Consumption Calculation Tool) is a software tool developed for the simulation of fuel consumption and CO2 emissions from heavy-duty vehicles in a variety of complete truck and trailer configurations and using various heavy-duty vehicle duty cycles. Based on component test data, VECTO is built upon the calculation routines initially developed by the Technical University of Graz, Austria. The ICCT has compared the VECTO tool with the (Phase 1) GEM emission model used for similar purposes by the US EPA.
Source: TCMV—67th meeting