Report on VECTO Technology Simulation Capabilities and Future Outlook

The European Commission is developing the Vehicle Energy Consumption Calculation Tool (VECTO) for Heavy Duty Vehicle CO2 certification purposes. VECTO is a vehicle simulation tool tailored to estimate CO2 emissions from heavy-duty vehicles of different categories, sizes and technologies. Further development and optimization of VECTO and the CO2 certification methodology requires assessing their capacity to properly simulate specific vehicle technologies and gathering additional feedback on the possibility to capture future technologies which are expected to be deployed on heavy-duty vehicles in the years to come. In order to investigate the VECTO capabilities and performance a dedicated questionnaire was formulated and distributed to various stakeholders. The technologies under investigation were previously identified through a literature review. The feedback received clearly pointed out the technologies that can be properly simulated by VECTO, which constituted an important part of the initial technology list, pointing out that VECTO and the accompanying certification methodology have reached a good level of maturity. The responses provided also some initial feedback on the implementation approach for the technologies which are not properly captured at the moment. The latter were separated into three groups based on the type of work that is required for including them in the certification methodology which could relate either to the development of the VECTO software or further expansion-specialization of CO2 certification methodology or a combination of the two. The current report presents the findings of the survey and outlines possible future steps for the further development of VECTO software and the accompanying certification methodologyJRC.C.4-Sustainable Transpor