Project uCARe

With four million people dying annually due to outdoor pollution, improvement of air quality has become one of society’s main challenges. In Europe, traffic and transport have a large effect on air quality, specifically passenger cars and commercial vehicles and to a lesser extent non-road mobile machinery. While technical improvements and more stringent legislation have had a significant impact, traffic and transport emissions are still too high and air quality is still poor. Although the use of electric and other zero-emission propulsion technologies may drastically reduce the pollutant exhaust emissions from traffic, the slow introduction of such vehicles as well as the trend of increasing vehicle lifetimes means that vehicles with internal combustion engines are expected to dominate the fleet beyond 2030. This project is the first opportunity to improve emissions of vehicles, not by improving vehicle technology, but by actively involving vehicle users and enabling their contribution to clean driving. 

The overall aim of uCARe is to reduce the overall pollutant emissions of the existing combustion engine vehicle fleet by providing vehicle users with simple and effective tools to decrease their individual emissions and to support stakeholders with an interest in local air quality in selecting feasible intervention strategies that lead to the desired user behaviour.

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Cheap and simple monitoring solutions for car emissions.

Standardized emission measurement tools like PEMS are expensive and laborious, and therefore not suitable to be applied in a large fleet. Beyond PEMS, there are several other methods to monitor vehicle emissions using standard (cheap) sensors, monitoring boxes and data channels. In Deliverable 1.4 you can read more about these methods.

Project Description

uCARe is a project funded by the European Union (H2020 LC-MG-1-1-2018) with the aim to reduce the impact of transport on air quality. The project has a 36 months duration and started on the 1st of May 2019. The budget is 3 million Euro, spent on 288 person months by 14 partners.

The ambition of uCARe is to reduce the overall pollutant emissions of the existing vehicle fleet to improve air quality with impact on, among others, the environment and people’s health.

To achieve this, uCARe will:

  • provide vehicle users with simple, insightful and effective tools to decrease their individual emissions;
  • support stakeholders with an interest in local air quality in selecting feasible intervention strategies that lead to the desired user behaviour.

Standardised data

There is a great deal  of data on pollutant emissions available in the uCARe consortium. The uCARe project will make these data publicly available in so-called Augmented Engine Maps (AEMs). An AEM provides the pollutant emissions for a specific car model and make. The AEM shows how, for instance, the NOx emissions depend on speed and CO2 for a hot engine, but also for a cold engine. Other emission maps include non-tailpipe emissions such as wear emissions from tires and brakes. This data can then be used for developing  tools that give drivers advice on how to reduce their pollutant emissions.

Driver awareness of behaviour influence

To make drivers aware of the effect of their driving behaviour, uCARe will publish a set of tools, including:

  • Video clips for a do-it-yourself evaluation of the driver’s car. These videos show how to use low costs household materials to evaluate the pollutant emissions produced by the car, and how the driver’s behaviour influences these emissions.
  • Simple tests with lab-grade equipment to assess the pollutant emissions of individual cars. For instance,  at a car fair, or a fleet of cars at specific locations ( e.g. near a school playground.
  • Sensor-readings based tools to provide feedback to the driver. Simple feedback might be given during the trip; more complex feedback can be provided after a trip. The uCARe team believes that specific feedback is more effective than more general  recommendations.

Pilots

Organisations such as cities, ‘green’ NGOs and drivers’ associations that want to use the above mentioned tools to set up campaigns to change the drivers’ behaviour, can receive support from the uCARe project. The support will consist of providing all materials to perform a pilot for the campaign. uCARe will also assess the impact of the planned campaign based on the results of the pilot. As much as possible uCARe will make results, including lessons learned from the pilots, publicly available to allow for its use during and beyond the project duration.

Project partners