ALL New Diesel Cars Fail The EU NOx Real-World Emissions Tests
Friday, 8. June 2018
A shocking survey has been released showing that all new diesel engine cars fail to meet EU standards in independent real-world emissions tests. The survey carried out by the International Council Of Clean Transport (ICCT) found that 4 manufacturer groups had average emissions more than 12 times above the Euro 6 diesel type-approval limit, with the highest emitting vehicle family having emissions 18 times the limit!!!!
Petrol cars performed better with all Euro 6 petrol models receiving a ‘good’ or ‘moderate’ rating. In fact, the highest emitting petrol Euro 6 vehicle family had approximately the same level of NOx emissions as the lowest-emitting diesel vehicle family.
And this wasn’t a test on a few hundred vehicles the tests were carried out on 700,000 cars and 4,850 vehicle models, nearly all designed and built to Euro standards 3-6, across Europe.
The project named CONOX and funded by the Swiss Federal Office for The Environment, had an initial dataset comprising of samples collected in France, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.
In London, for example, researchers used remote sensing technology to measure the emissions from more than 100,000 vehicles during a 5-month sampling campaign that stretched from November 2017 through to March 2018.
Measurements were carried out over a period of 45 days at 9 locations in the Greater London area. All results have been put into a searchable database by the Real Urban Emissions Initiative (TRUE – no I couldn’t work that out either) which aims at bringing transparency to the public debate and awareness of vehicle emissions and urban air quality.
The way that the readings were obtained involved using technology developed by ICCT which required a beam of light to be passed through the exhaust emissions from a sampling location on the road. Automatic number plate recognition technology was used to determine which model of car was being tested.
They also felt that this method of monitoring real-world emission made it almost impossible to cheat or falsify the figures. Their results were graded Good (Green), Moderate (Yellow) and Poor (Red). They also grouped them under Euro 3, 4, 5 and 6 and even Euro 6 results only showed a few diesel cars that had climbed out of Poor to Moderate.
No Euro 6 standard diesel engines received a green rating but the yellow ratings were achieved by only 1 top-selling brand and that was BMW. Euro 5 performed particularly poorly and it was one of the car families in this group whose NOx emissions were 18 times over the limit.
You can read more about these frightening results by visiting the TRUE website. By Graham Hill
