Dieselgate’s Long Tail: Car Emissions Data Cheat by 80% Today

The ICCT report 5 years after the introduction of anti-dieselgate approval

() – The gap between official and real car emissions on the road has grown by 80% in the last 5 years. That is, since the introduction of WLTP, which stands for Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicles Test Procedure, the new procedure for laboratory tests on vehicle exhaust gases. The procedure by which the EU tried to respond to the Dieselgate scandal.

The WLTP still needs to do its part. The official CO2 emission values of the WLTP type approval are “more representative than the actual values of the previous test procedure”, the International Council for Clean Transportation (ICCT) points out in a recently published report. “Our analysis shows a divergence of 7.7% for WLTP in 2018 compared to 32.7%” of the first procedure in force, but “the gap between real and official CO2 emissions has increased by more than 80% in the 5 years since the introduction of WLTP, reaching 14.1% in 2022“, stress the authors.

To arrive at these figures, the ICCT analysed the car emissions data reported by the European Environment Agency (EEA) and compared them with information on fuel consumption in real conditions from more than 160,000 cars with endothermic and hybrid engines.

These figures confirm the alarm the EU Court of Auditors launched last week. From 2010 to today the real emissions of endothermic cars – which still represent about 75% of the new registrations – have not decreased, wrote the EU auditors. For diesel, the curve is flat, while for petrol vehicles, there is a marginal decrease of 4.6%. According to the ICCT report, according to WLTP data, the values of homologated CO2 emissions of cars decreased by 7.3% between 2018 and 2022, while emissions in real driving conditions decreased by only 2.3% during the same period.

“This growing gap reduces the effectiveness of EU CO2 standards in reducing CO2 emissions from car and van exhaust,” the ICCT said. “This is because CO2 reduction targets are implemented by setting lower targets for official CO2 emissions. The growing gap between official and real emissions, however, leads to a reduction in real-world CO2 emissions lower than expected by regulators“.