Avoiding a baseline bubble: truck edition

The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) recently published an insightful report on the CO₂ emissions of European trucks. The report covers vehicles manufactured in the second half of 2019 with CO₂ emissions certified using the new simulation-based method called VECTO. Although this sounds like an oddly specific and small sample of data, these values are quite a big deal.

Last year, the European Union adopted its first-ever CO₂ standards for trucks, which mandate a fleet-wide reduction of 15% in 2025 and 30% in 2030 relative to a fixed, yet currently unknown, baseline. This baseline will be defined by the CO₂ emissions of VECTO-certified trucks registered in the second half of 2019 and the first half of 2020. This approach for defining a baseline does raise some concerns.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: An inflated CO₂ baseline would reduce the burden on manufacturers to meet the CO₂ standards. This creates a perverse incentive for manufacturers to influence the baseline, a strategy that is not unheard of. So, let us examine more closely the incentives and mechanisms for truck manufacturers to report inflated CO₂ values.

First, let’s examine the incentives. Manufacturers are quick to point out that a deliberate increase in reported CO₂ emissions to inflate the baseline would be counterproductive, as it could hamper a manufacturer’s position in the competitive European market. To contest this simplistic reasoning, one does not need to imagine the idea of anti-competitive practices. The €3.8 billion fine in the recent truck cartel case ought to have set manufacturers straight.

Taking actions to inflate the baseline could be an economically rational decision, as it could enable lower compliance efforts without the risk of heavy fines. The figure below shows the compliance performance of a hypothetical manufacturer declaring its real CO₂ emissions (left) and reporting inflated values (right) during the baselining period. The black dot in the vertical axis is the baseline value determined from the reported CO₂ emissions from all manufacturers. The red step line represents the manufacturer’s fleet CO₂ emissions, assuming a linear reduction from year to year. While the CO₂ target is enforced from 2025 onwards, manufacturers can accumulate early credits from 2019 to 2024. The black step line represents the threshold for the accumulation of those early-credits (see here for more details on the credit/debt system). The green blocks represent the credits accrued by the manufacturer, and the red blocks represent the debt accrued in 2025.

In the hypothetical scenario without an inflated baseline (left), the credits accumulated in 2019 and 2020 are not sufficient to compensate for the debt caused by under-compliance in 2025. This is the compliance gap. On the other hand, if the manufacturer were to over-report the CO₂ emissions of its vehicles (right), it would close the compliance gap in 2025 with the same actual CO₂ reduction effort. Although the manufacture would compromise its competitive position during the baselining period and would forego the credits in 2019, it would increase the credits accrued in 2020 and 2021 while reducing its debt in 2025. The net effect in the case shown above would be to close the compliance gap.

This thought experiment raises two important questions. One, how much market power is required for a single manufacturer to be able to significantly influence the overall baseline? And, two, how does the above-mentioned compliance gap translate into a financial incentive?

To answer these questions, I used the preliminary CO₂ data from ACEA’s report and combined it with the truck registration data for 2019 from IHS Markit. As there is no data available to quantify the relative CO₂ performance of each manufacturer compared to their competitors, I assumed that all manufacturers have the same average CO₂ emissions in each vehicle subgroup. I then assessed the over-reporting required during the baselining period for each manufacturer to reduce its effective CO₂ reduction requirement from 15% to 14%, assuming that other manufacturers do not over-report. The results of this analysis are shown in the table below.

If VW’s subsidiary TRATON, manufacturer of the MAN and Scania brands, were to inflate its CO₂ emissions by only 1.6% during the baselining period, it would reduce its 2025 compliance effort by a full percentage point from 15% to 14% CO₂ reduction. If TRATON were to only achieve a 14% reduction without baseline inflation, it would incur a penalty of around €200 million in 2025. This strong return-on-inflation is quite the incentive.

So far, we have established that individual manufacturers could have a large impact on the baseline emissions and that the financial penalties set by the CO₂ standards are a strong incentive for large manufacturers to put their market power to use. But what are the actual mechanisms available to manufacturers to inflate the baseline?

The regulatory provisions around VECTO were designed to reduce the likelihood that manufacturers certify their products for better CO₂ performance than reality, not to prevent manufacturers from certifying a worse-than-real CO₂ performance. As a result, a number of avenues are available for manufacturers to legally report higher CO₂ emissions during the baselining period.

Manufacturers may choose to use the standard values defined in the regulation when conducting VECTO simulations for the certification of CO₂ emissions. These standard values, intended to reduce the certification cost for small manufacturers, typically represent the worst-case CO₂ performance to encourage detailed component testing. ACEA states in its latest report that more than 90% of the VECTO CO₂ values are based on component tests, but it is not clear how the remaining 10% of vehicles using default values affect the baseline. This statistic does not negate the possibility of other testing flexibilities being exploited.

Fortunately, none of this is news to regulators. The European Commission has been busy putting in place provisions that will help them identify undue increases to the baseline and enable its correction. It is to be hoped that these active policy interventions and the watchful eyes of independent institutions will serve as a strong enough deterrent.

The lack of reliable CO₂ data forced the hand of regulators to put a lot of eggs in the 2019/2020 basket during the design of the CO₂ standards for trucks. However, the central message of this blog is one of cautious optimism. While ACEA’s preliminary results are somewhat encouraging, they also show that there is a large spread in the reported CO₂ emissions, which does not rule out the exploitation of the flexibilities in VECTO. At any rate, the official baseline values—to be published in April 2021—are what counts. Only then will we be able to judge the integrity of the baseline and have certainty on the absolute benefits that the truck CO₂ standards will deliver.

Related Content