VECTO: bringing down CO2 emissions and fuel costs of heavy-duty vehicles

This infographic explains the working of the VECTO computer simulation tool in detail, and sets out how VECTO will help to bring down CO2 emissions and fuel costs of heavy-duty vehicles by promoting transparency, vehicle comparability and competition.

Since 2010, the European Commission has been developing a computer simulation tool called VECTO, which will model CO2 emissions from a wide variety of complete truck and trailer configurations. VECTO will provide these vehicle-specific CO2 figures for various mission profiles, taking into account variables such as specific usage patterns, vehicle configurations and different payloads.
VECTO has a lot of potential to significantly reduce CO2 emissions from trucks, as it provides a credible, standardised way of comparing fuel efficiency. This means that transport operators can choose the most fuel-efficient vehicle more easily, thereby significantly reducing CO2. It will also lead to increased transparency and competition, driving the market uptake of the cleanest vehicles.
Before setting the direction for future CO2 reduction policy, we first need to have a clear understanding of the baseline – reflecting today’s level of truck CO2 emissions. VECTO is a necessary tool to close this knowledge gap. It is essential that policy makers give time to analyse the impact of this data collection and certification procedure before considering setting CO2 limits.
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