The Real Urban Emissions Initiative (TRUE) is a partnership of organisations working together to improve urban air quality in cities around the world.
The TRUE partners are:
TRUE’s objective is to inform policy makers, manufacturers, and consumers of the impact of vehicle emissions on air quality through good data, transparency, and technical expertise.
TRUE has used the ICCT’s methodology to create a traffic light rating system which ranks cars based on their real-world nitrous oxide (NOx) exhaust emissions. Green is a ‘good’ rating, yellow is ‘moderate’ and red means that a vehicle produces more than 180 mg/km of NOx and is ‘poor’.
Anyone can search for the TRUE rating of a car by make, model, engine displacement, fuel type, and Euro standard.
The TRUE rating system uses data collected across Europe in the CONOX project, which was funded by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment. It is the largest collection of data on vehicles emissions in Europe to be brought together so far. The measurements of the 375,000 individual cars from this data set have been used to create the TRUE ranking.
Further data from testing undertaken by TRUE in London and Paris will be added to the rating system in the future.
The results confirm that real-world NOx emissions are systemically much higher from diesel cars, and even the newest models (Euro 6). All Euro 6 petrol cars received a ‘good’ or ‘moderate’ rating while no Euro 6 diesel car received a ‘good’ rating.
Our remote sensing tests have not, so far, captured the very latest RDE compliant vehicles because there are very few on the roads.
We hope and anticipate that RDE-compliant vehicles will perform much better, and future updates of the TRUE data will be able to monitor and report on this development.
Twitter