The difference between reported and real-world CO 2 emissions: How much improvement can be expected by WLTP introduction?

Abstract

The monitoring and reporting of CO2 emissions of light duty vehicles in Europe and other major markets is based on the New European Driving Cycle and the accompanying test protocol. This procedure has been proven non-representative of real world vehicle operation, fuel consumption and CO2 emissions leading to a gap between officially reported emissions and the ones experienced during real world operation. This gap is reported to be increasing with time. To address this issue and improve the certification procedure for pollutant emissions of vehicles over real driving, the new Worldwide Harmonized Light duty vehicle Test Protocol was designed. This new test procedure is expected to provide more realistic emission and fuel consumption results. In this paper a first estimate of the certification-reality gap under the present (2015) conditions is attempted and the impact of the new test procedure is investigated. Tests were performed on three real vehicles over the two cycles which allowed the development of representative simulation models. A detailed simulation matrix was subsequently formulated, taking into account the two tests and expected conditions occurring during real world driving. Results show that for 2013-14 model year European passenger cars the difference in certified and actually emitted CO2 emissions for an average European passenger car reaches up to 40 g CO2/km (~32% higher than certification). WLTP introduction is expected to improve the picture, however a shortfall of about 10-15% between official and real world may remain.