Diesel, natural gas, and electric heavy-duty vehicles can be designed and manufactured with the capability of complying with the ultra-low NOx limits envisioned in the next set of California and federal HDV regulations. But that is not to say that the outcomes for each are equivalent.
In 2017, Mayor Anne Hidalgo of Paris and Mayor Saddiq Khan of London jointly committed to making data on real-world vehicle pollutant emissions available to residents of those cities.
Remote sensing is one technique used to measure real-world NOx emissions in Europe. Remote sensing measurements conducted by the Canton of Zurich are unique in terms of how consistently they have been collected since 2000 and the steep road grade at the main remote sensing monitoring site.
While the Dieselgate scandal raised awareness of defeat devices—software calibrations that manipulate pollutant emission controls when vehicles are in the real world—third-party evaluation remains difficult because these devices are embedded in sophisticated computer code.
Remote sensing is potentially the best option for fleet emissions monitoring, the development of an emissions factor, the identification of individual high- or low-emitting vehicles, and the screening for groups of high-emitting vehicles for market surveillance.
In the European Union, CO2 emissions from commercial vehicles grew much faster than from passenger vehicles from 1990 to 2014. Trucks and buses now produce about a quarter of CO2 emissions from road transport in the EU, and that share is growing as emissions from cars and vans decline further to meet increasingly tight CO2 standards.
As vehicle pollution and fuel efficiency regulations have become more stringent, the technologies required to mitigate emissions and reduce fuel consumption become increasingly complex.
Analyzes the benefits of establishing separate engine CO2 standards in addition to full-vehicle regulations to specifically drive improvements in heavy-duty engine efficiency.
