Italy: 5 million of diesel cars at stake due to RDE

The introduction of the new mandatory Real Driving Emissions (RDE) would partially banned the circulation of around 43% of the Italian fleet between 2020 and 2025.

The European legislation would primarily affect diesel Euro 3 vehicles, since they constitute around the 13% of the Italian national fleet with almost 5 million cars, according to statistics published by the site Facile.it. These figures are based on the official data released by the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure up to October 2017.

The number of diesel Euro 3 cars on the Italian roads spans from 8,5% to 22%, depending on the region. According to the Italian motor vehicles registration authorities (Motorizzazione), however, the total registration of such diesel cars - including non “potentially active” cars - goes up to almost 8,3 million units, around 16% of the whole Italian fleet.

Euro 3, together with Euro 4, Euro 5 and Euro 6 represent over 22,3 million cars in the country, meaning a 42,9% of the whole Italian market.

The partial ban imposed by the RDE, between 2020 and 2025, would also include petrol cars powered by Euro 0, diesel Euro 0, diesel Euro 1 and diesel Euro 2.

What is the Real Driving Emissions test?

Already before the emissions scandal broke, the European Commission had proposed to measure emissions in real driving conditions. This test procedure further tightens the rules since it checks the emissions of NOx and ultrafine particles (Particle Number – PN) from vehicles on the road and significantly reduces the discrepancy between emissions measured in real driving and those measured in a laboratory. The Real Driving Emissions (RDE) procedure complements the laboratory test.

In the RDE procedure pollutant emissions are measured by portable emission measuring systems (PEMS) that are attached to the car while driving in real conditions on the road. This means that the car is driven outside and on a real road according to random variations of parameters such as acceleration, deceleration, ambient temperature, and payloads.