BS-VI norms on real driving emissions will bring India up-to-par globally

With fuel prices going up over and over again, you might want to invest in cars that run on alternative fuels. Of course, electric is the newest way to go, but charging infrastructure is still in its infancy. CNG, on the other hand, is widely available. Here is a list of cars available in CNG variants.

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The Bharat Stage VI (BS-VI) roll-out in April will not just result in cleaner air but also enable carmakers to record real driving emissions (RDE), thus allowing for more stringent violation norms which will bring India at par with the developed markets.

Car manufacturers will be made to randomly pick three customer vehicles every year and test them for emissions. The exercise will be conducted in cooperation with government-backed vehicle test agencies that also issue certification for a vehicle’s street-worthiness.

India’s top car producer Maruti Suzuki, which is busy making the transition from BS-IV to BS-VI, has sold more than 300,000 BS-VI compliant vehicles so far and is already preparing for the upcoming changes.

A top Maruti Suzuki executive said, "BS-VI is not just about emission it is also about in-service conformity. This is a new norm for BS-VI where vehicles which are run for more than six months or 15,000 km or maximum 100,000 km for five years, the testing agency will ask the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to pick out three such customer vehicles every year and test it again on the chassis and prove that the emissions are not violating the norms."

While the government is believed to have contemplated enforcing the RDE norms much before April 1, the auto industry requested the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways to implement the norms only after BS-VI fuel is available throughout India.

"This is very much part of the BS-VI notification. Everybody thinks that BS-VI is about tailpipe emission but it is also about RDE to capture data. The test agency record RDE which is called as the data acquisition phase. Once that happens after one year they will come out with a conformity factor and the RDE regulation will come into 2023," the Maruti Suzuki executive added.

RDE is the most preferred emission regulation method since it is aimed at reducing the gap between type-approval emission that occur during the certification (homologation) testing phase and those in the real world.

Vehicular emission methods took big goodwill knock when German auto giant Volkswagen was accused of fudging data for years in the US. Since then several countries have put stricter norms to check on any intentional and unintentional violations.

A top executive from Hyundai India said, "This is the next generation regulations which will truly bring India to the global level as far vehicle emissions are concerned."

"Presently once a vehicle is sold there is no data regarding its emissions during its entire lifecycle. The upcoming real-world testing will significantly change the way vehicle emissions are looked at. There is a caveat though that the vehicles should be serviced regularly and properly," the executive added.