NOxgate expands: 93% of diesel vehicles tested fail to meet Euro 6 NOx emission standards; average is 7 times over the limit

The Digest looks at ICCT’s comprehensive report on diesel vehicle NOx emissions in the EU and US. Where will the emissions crisis spread?

The VW crisis just keeps getting worse, with Volkswagen suspending its VW, Audi, and Porsche R&D chiefs, as Audi confirmed that 2.1 million of its vehicles were outfitted with defeat devices, and reports surfaced that the company was ignored warnings issued years ago by staff and a component supplier that the company’s defeat devices were illegal. VW shares tumbled 7 percent in Monday morning trading on the Frankfort bourse.

However, the bad news could spread, with an ICCT report resurfacing that says that 93% of diesel-vehicle vehicle analyzed in its latest NOx emissions study failed to meet Euro 6 emissions standards under real-world driving conditions.

“Strong evidence of a real-world NOx compliance issue” for recent technology diesel passenger cars, both for the EU and US 

ICCT at the time of the report’s intial release last October described the study as “the most comprehensive report on the on-road behavior of the latest generation of diesel passenger cars published to date.” Here’s the report.

ICCT said that the report “presents strong evidence of a real-world NOx compliance issue for recent technology diesel passenger cars, both for the EU and US test vehicles” and found that “average, on-road emission levels of NOx were estimated at 7 times the certified emission limit for Euro 6 vehicles.”

ICCT noted that “some remarkable differences among the performance of all the vehicles tested, with a few vehicles performing substantially better”, noting that technologies for “real-world clean” diesels already exist, and that what is needed are policies “to ensure that manufacturers will use these technologies and calibrate them to effectively control emissions over the large majority of in-use operating conditions, not just those covered by the test cycle.”

By pointing out the discrepancy between test cycle and real-world diesel-vehicle NOx emissions, the study anticipates the current VW crisis. However, the problem is much wider than a single manufacturer, as six in total were analyzed in this report and only a single vehicle out of 15 met Euro 6 emissions standards that the EU moved to last year.

Specifically, the ICCT charges that “there is substantial evidence that the actual, on-road emissions may not be sufficiently controlled under certain operating conditions that are not covered by the laboratory test.”

The test is part of the problem

ICCT says that part of the blame has to be shared with the test design itself, “which has not been updated even as NOx emission limits for diesel passenger cars on the basis of the NEDC driving cycle were reduced by 68% from Euro 4 to Euro 6.”

ICCT charged that “the lack of updates to the type-approval procedures in some jurisdictions have encouraged engineering strategies that ensure good fuel efficiency and compliance with the relevant emission limits—as long as the vehicles are operated within the narrow boundary conditions of the standardized test, but not necessarily during normal use.”

Specifically, the ICCT noted that “measuring emissions under controlled conditions in a laboratory increases the repeatability and the comparability of results, which makes this an excellent approach for vehicle type-approval tests,” but that the tests as designed “eliminate several factors that influence emissions (e.g., road gradient, hard accelerations, use of air conditioning, and traffic or weather conditions).”

A note from Europe: if we had known the truth, we might have pushed harder on fuels

A European friend of the Digest noted:

“This all comes back to one guy: Peter Mock, managing director of a small environmental lobby organization ICCT in Berlin, who 18 months ago wanted to prove that German diesel cars were less polluting in the US than in Europe, because environmental legislation was more stringent in the US and also better enforced. 

With his research Mock started this process. The impact of Mock’s words? The shares of BMW dropped 9% after the magazine Autobild (with Peter Mock as source) brought the news that the BMW X3 xDrive 20d produced 11x more NOx than the European emission standards allow. With the 2007 JRC report, you know that Mock was certainly not the only one.       

In the mean time these automakers and their lobbyists were effective in frustrating higher biofuel blends like E10 in Germany and E15 in the US. If everybody would have known the truth about the real emissions of both petrol and diesel cars this would have given a boost to most of our cleaner bio and fossil fuel initiatives like CNG, LNG, DME, ED95 (Scania), higher ethanol blends etc.”

More on the story in The Digest today.

Thought Leadership: We should not be surprised about Volkswagen’s “Diesel-Gate”