Auto industry fears it will not be able to recover the investments made in BS-VI in time to invest in new emission norms that kick in from 2022.
Hit by coronavirus disruptions and the slowdown in demand, the automotive industry has requested the government to put on hold the next generation emission norms that kick in from 2022.
Speaking at the 60th annual general meeting, president of the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) Rajan Wadhera said that the new norms should be put off as the industry didn't have the money to invest to meet the regulations. Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change Prakash Javdekar was among the panelist invited for the session.
"The industry does not have the ability to invest further for new regulations which are planned in the year 2022 and 2023. Therefore, we make a strong plea and request that the industry is not in a position to invest in new regulations like CAFE and RDE," Wadhera said.
The corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) norms propose to improve fuel-efficiency of vehicles by 30 percent from 2022 and 10 percent or more by 2021 end. Under CAFE, a car’s mileage will be decided on the litres of fuel its consumes for running 100 km. This will automatically lead to a reduction in carbon footprint.
The auto industry collectively invested more than Rs 40,000 crore in switching to BS-VI norms from BS-IV. BS-VI emission norms, which are thought to be the most advanced in the world, kicked in from April 1, 2020. But the implementation of the new norm coincided with the lockdown and COVID-19 disruption.
“The industry has made huge investments to upgrade to Bharat Stage VI (BS-VI) and the depreciation of this investment is also huge. The commensurate revenue has not been realised due to lack of consumer demand," Wadhera said.
The introduction of BS-VI also ploughed the way for the launch of real driving emissions (RDE). The test agency will record RDE during the data acquisition phase. Once that happens next year, it will come out with a conformity factor and the RDE regulation will come into force from 2023.
RDE is the most preferred emission regulation method since it is aimed at reducing the gap between type-approval emission, which occur during the certification (homologation) testing phase, and those in the real world.
Vehicular emission methods took a big knock when German auto giant Volkswagen was accused of fudging data for years in the US. Since then, several countries have put in place stricter norms to check on any intentional and unintentional violations
Under RDE norms, the testing agency will ask the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to pick out three customer BS-VI vehicles, which have run for more than six months or 15,000 km or a maximum 100,000 km for five years, every year and test them 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 was made available throughout India.