Assessing heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs) on-road NOx emission in China from on-board diagnostics (OBD) remote report data

Mobile source emissions are some of the major causes of air pollution across the world and are associated with numerous adverse health impacts. China has implemented increasingly stringent emission standards over the past few decades, the most recent one being the sixth emission standard (China VI) first rolled out in 2019. The China VI standard places special emphasis on tightening limits for NOx emission and introduces remote monitoring of vehicles' On-board diagnostics (OBD) data to reduce emissions from diesel and gas-powered heavy-duty vehicles (HDV). This paper aims to establish a methodology to calculate HDV NOx emissions on an extended timescale, and under real-world operations. OBD data was collected and examined from 53 China VI diesel HDVs and 14 China V diesel HDVs, which found that the average NOx emission factors are 1.420 g/km and 3.894 g/km for the two samples respectively; this indicates that the implementation of China VI standard helps to significantly reduce NOx emission from HDVs. Combining the emission factors and calculated travel distances collected by OBD and vehicle sales data, the China VI emission standard is estimated to have resulted in 43,969 tons of NOx emission reduction by the end of 2020. With China announcing country-wide enforcement of the new standard in 2021, >1.7 million tons of NOx emission could be avoided by 2023 annually.