THE UK VIEW FROM IVECO Martin Flach, product director for lveco UK, is broadly
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supportive of ACEA's plan to change the way CV emissions are measured. "Grams/kilowatt/hour has served its purpose in the past." he says, "but increasingly people want to be able to compare one vehicle with another and look at their whole environmental footprht.
The key to measuring CO2 is to use the right formula," he says. For Flach that means adopting a more application based measurement for light commercials and trucks. You need a metric that enables you to compare the utilisation of the vehicle," he insists. The best metric for vans is grams/cubic metre/km, because vans are more about volume than weight. When you get above 3.5-tonnes, it's more about the weight than volume and then gramsttonne/km is more appropriate."
He is comfortable with ACEA's proposed colour-coded vehicle efficiency rating, based on computer analysis of the various emissions of trucks not least because it Can easily provide accessible efficiency ratings for different types of vehicles.
Meanwhile, as ACEA promotes its computerised rating system Flach says: "Iveco will be actively involved with the discussions. It's certainly feasible. The challenge is to set up something useful and not something that confuses.
We need to take the focus away from just NOx and particulates and look at CO2 as well. We have to change metrics and hopefully that will give us a more holistic approach.
"We need to make sure that when we do a labelling system we don't end up saying a 44-tonner is red and 7.5-tonner is green just because fuel economy is better on a 7.5-tonner when you apply grams/tonnokm, you to start to get a more level playing field."