Monitoring heavy-duty vehicles’ CO2 emissions and their costs

In 2014 the European Commission published a Strategy for reducing HDV fuel consumption and CO2 emissions in Europe. This strategy focusses on short term actions to certify, monitor and report HDV fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.

This study identifies three options for monitoring of HDV CO2 emissions and fuel consumption data ensuing from the future certification procedure under type-approval: 1) Member States reporting through the national vehicle registration process per individual vehicle to the EC (via the EEA), 2) OEMs once a year reporting directly to the EC (via the EEA) and 3) by cross reporting of VIN numbers by Member States and VECTO result data by OEMs to the EC (via the EEA).

Vehicle manufacturers prefer cross reporting, mainly since this option limits their administrative costs. Member States have expressed different views: some supported the cost argument favouring option 3, others argued that option 1 provides more credibility to the monitoring data.

The assessed monitoring costs range between € 1 (Option 3) and € 5 (Option 1) per vehicle registered in the EU. Decisive cost categories are development and operation of the needed IT systems by Member States in order to process large VECTO result files (Option 1) and the definition and agreement of the modus operandi of OEMs with 28 Member States and transfer of individual data files per vehicle (Option 1).