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As U.S. and European regulation of automotive emissions is getting more stringent, great interest is growing around new solutions for future emission standards. Pollutant reduction can be achieved improving both engine out emission and aftertreatment system efficiency. Engine out emission can be reduced improving combustion process especially during warm-up, friction and the engine management system. In any case engine out emission reduction involves engine sophistication increasing costs, which must be accurately evaluated, especially for small displacement large mass production engine. Since, as it is well known, 80 - 90 per cent of HC and CO emissions are produced during the first 100s of NEDC cycle, great improvement could be achieved reducing the catalyst light-off time. Different configurations of exhaust gas after treatment system have been tested to improve conversion efficiency during warm-up phases.

The new European Legislation requires new strategies in order to achieve a reliable emission diagnostic over the entire life of the vehicle (EOBD). For the validation and the fine-tuning of the new diagnostic controls, the car manufacturers must manage fleets of vehicles in order to evaluate the behavior of these diagnostics over a real aging cycle. This paper describes a useful tool that has been developed to check the most important diagnostic indexes behavior with aging, that help us in the management of a durability fleet. The system is composed of: a specific hardware added to the Engine Control Unit (ECU) a real time software for the automatic storage of the most important diagnostic parameters an off line software for data analysis. During the use of durability car the system runs automatically and does not require any additional operation to the driver (“black-box system”), and no additional skilled people is required for the data acquisition.