CO2 emission compliance for Light Commercial Vehicles Analysis of the factors that influence CO2 emissions and target in years 2025-29 and simulations of different possible scenarios.

In the last decades the importance of the reduction of CO2 and pollutant emissions has raised, mainly in the transportation sector; for this reason, in Europe were introduced some rules to set the limits of emissions and the way to measure them. This work is focused on Light Commercial Vehicles (LCV), the factors that influence their CO2 emissions and on the European Regulation for the calculation of the CO2 target for the years 2025-29 with the comparison with the previous regulation (2021-24). As a first point all the factors that influence the target and emissions are analyzed starting from the mass, type and dimensions of the vehicle, tires and optional equipment effects. A deepening on the change of mass typology considered in the regulation, from MRO (mass in running order) in 2021-24 to TM (test mass) from 2025 on, is performed to understand the entity of the modification of the regulation effect through the years; the use of MRO was advantageous, but in any case, the main result obtained is the beneficial effect of the increment of mass on the CO2 target. Then are described the steps for the definition of a forecast for the vehicle registrations of the year 2025, starting from a model in which only few versions, the so-called modal versions, are included to make the model easy to be managed to the final complex forecast with all the details of the vehicles. The forecast is important to understand the composition of the fleet of the future year and which actions have to be performed to be compliant in order to decide the strategies to be applied; due to stringent regulation for CO2 emissions a huge percent, found as 17% vehicles in the entire fleet, of zero emissions vehicles (ZEV) is needed to reach the compliance. This represents a huge challenge for OEMs since the growth of ZEV is much lower than expected and in 2024 the percentage in the entire LCV market was almost 7%. In the end two different scenarios, in addition to the one obtained with the forecast, are simulated to visualize the gap to compliance in case of various fleet compositions: the first is the extreme case in which only ICE vehicles registered, and the second case assumes a fleet mix equal to what occurred for the year 2024; they are analyzed and they both result far from compliance, up to 33 g/km in the first case and 22 g/km in the latter. The values obtained from the simulations are interpolated and are used to find out the relation that links the gap to the CO2 target imposed by the regulation and the ZEV percentage, finding values ranging from 2 to 3,6 g/km per percentage. Then the calculations of the CO2 target are repeated with the regulation for the years 2021-24 for all the scenarios, resulting in the achievement of the compliance for all the scenarios underlying the excessive distance between the regulation’s targets of subsequent years.