Euro Fuel-Economy, Emissions Tests Get Failing Grade

LONDON – Automakers’ fuel-economy and emissions ratings are a key part of marketing, but if those claims are shown to be false or skewered, it might be better if they had not been made in the first place.

According to Transport and Environment (T&E), a Brussels-based organization that promotes transport policies based on sustainable development, the current system of testing cars to measure fuel economy and carbon-dioxide emissions in Europe “is not fit for purpose.”

T&E took the results of vehicles tested in a laboratory and compared them with fuel consumption and auto emissions “in the real world” and came up with some startling figures.

In a recently released report titled “Mind the Gap,” T&E claimed the difference between real-world fuel consumption and automakers’ claims widened from 8% in 2001 to a “staggering” 31% in 2013 and without action is likely to exceed 50% by 2020. “Distorted test results deceive drivers who achieve much poorer fuel economy than is promised,” the report says.

Similarly with emissions, T&E says, “On average, only half of the improvement in emissions claimed in tests has been delivered on the road.”

The organization says Mercedes cars had the biggest gap between test and real-world performance, adding that “less than 20% of the improvement in emissions measured in tests of Opel/Vauxhall (General Motors) cars is realized on the road.”

Automakers, not drivers, were the cause “as obsolete official test results are manipulated and new technology is fitted to cars, which largely improves fuel economy in laboratories rather than on the road,” the report says.

The problem, T&E argues, lies with the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) test, a standardized European procedure to compare the performance of different cars in similar conditions. EU automakers have used NEDC since 1996 as a regular procedure to test cars before sale, but despite significant changes in automotive technology since then the assessment requirements have stayed the same.

Comparisons with real-life scenarios are distorted, the report continues, because the NEDC tests take place in a laboratory so the results do not allow for external factors, such as road type, weather and traffic conditions.

The NEDC, according to T&E, is “obsolete, unrepresentative of modern cars and driving styles, and full of loopholes that car makers exploit to produce better test results.”

What do European automakers think? ACEA, the association of the European motor industry, agrees with some of the points made about NEDC, if not T&E’s interpretation of them.

“Any difference between customers’ individual fuel consumption and NEDC figures is...the result of the difference between drivers’ behavior in real-world conditions on the one hand and laboratory tests prescribed by legal requirements on the other,” a spokesperson says. “In real-world conditions, even if two different drivers drive exactly the same vehicle under exactly the same conditions, each is likely to have a different consumption performance.”

Emissions tests, ACEA notes, must be conducted in laboratories and the results “are verified by an independent authority... as part of EU (European Union) type-approval.”

ACEA says it is working to help develop a new global test cycle, the Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicles Test Procedure (WLTP), which is designed to more closely represent real-world driving.

The U.K.’s Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders agrees there is a need for a more suitable testing process and is working with automakers and regulators to “implement a new solution,” a spokesman says, adding the NEDC test “cannot, and is not intended to, represent the infinite variations of the real world.”

However, it is “important that motorists continue to be made aware of how vehicle efficiency can be affected by driving style, load carried and vehicle maintenance, along with traffic, weather and road conditions,” the spokesman says.

But while the EU wants the WLTP test introduced by 2017, automakers would like it enacted later.

“We need new tests to be introduced,” says Greg Archer, author of the “Mind the Gap” report and head of the clean-vehicles team at T&E, “but it's a bit disingenuous of SMMT to be promoting new tests, given that ACEA is trying to delay their introduction until after 2021.”

Many of the problems cited by T&E might be sorted out with a new test, “but of course (automakers are) fighting and lobbying to delay the introduction of the new test so they can continue exploiting the flexibilities in the present one,” Archer tells WardsAuto.