Europe goes soft on emissions

Before the Dieselgate scandal, the next lot of European Commission emissions legislation would have been even tougher for car makers to meet.

It moved away from the laboratory-based New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) and onto the real-world test of the Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicles Test Procedure (WLTP).

But the plan, scheduled to become law in September 2017, has already been watered down, with the European Commissioner for Industrial Policy, Elzbieta Bienkowska, proposing to make the WLPT tests easier to meet.

The EU's CO2 emissions target for 2020/2021 was to be set at 80g/km, but Bienkowska's plan would let car makers exceed that by another 50 per cent.

While earlier softening proposals were to allow car makers 60 per cent leeway on the incoming regulation up to late 2019, the Bienkowska plan will be a permanent addition, effectively moving the limit to 120g/km for CO2 and more than double the NOx limit in the original plan until 2020.

"The EU is the first and only region in the world to mandate these robust testing methods," Bienkowska said in a statement.

"And this is not the end of the story. We are working hard to present a proposal to strengthen the type-approval system and reinforce the independence of vehicle testing."

The European Parliament has yet to vote on the amendments to the legislation, but there has been pressure on legislators to make the enforceable targets more easily achievable by car makers in the aftermath of Dieselgate.

The EU has been understandably reticent to appear as though it's acquiescing to the car makers and the lobbying of countries like Germany, France, the UK and Italy, but non-profit environmental groups insist that's exactly what's happening.

"The manufacturers have been saying that 'we do this and that in the NEDC but we are not allowed to do these things in the real-world test but we want to be given credit for them'," said Greg Archer, the Vehicles Programme Manager at non-profit lobby group, Transport & Environment.

Archer arrives at his differential figures by looking through the European Commission's correlation exercises, designed to ease the shock of the switch from the lab-based NEDC to the real-world tests.

"If you add all these things up you get to a gap of between 40 and 45 per cent between the NEDC and the WLTP."

Even those companies who have been loudly insisting their NOx testing is completely legitimate can have huge discrepancies between their test figures for CO2 and the WLTP figures, with Archer claiming the gap is biggest at Mercedes-Benz, at well over 50 per cent.

"We don't know enough flexibilities in the test to make them add up to 50 per cent, so something else is going on," he said.

"I am not saying that means there is a default device but they need to explain how they achieved such low levels in the laboratory and got more than 50 per cent more in the real-world test. Where they are designed to operate if not on the road?

"From what we know about the different ways manufacturers manipulate the tests, they should not be able to get more than 40-45 per cent difference between test and real-world figures.

"They've very clearly rolled over and made the test far easier than it should have been."