Bharat Stage VI (BS-VI), the set emission standard compliance by all auto & commercial vehicle manufacturers from April 2020, has been the spotlight of discussions across various forums. Bharat Stage Emission Standards (BSES) was set in 2000 by the Government of India in alignment with the European standards (EURO) to regulate polluting exhaust gases from internal combustion engines (ICE) and spark plug ignition engines, governed by the Central Pollution Control Board under Ministry of Environment, Forest, & Climate change.
Obligatory commitment at the Paris climate agreement to reduce carbon footprint by 33-35% from its level at 2005 before 2030 has instigated major reforms in emission norms for vehicles along with other environmental drives. The recent spotlight of Delhi’s pollution problems further pushed advancement to the BS-VI compliance norms leapfrogging from BS-IV much ahead in April 2020 against the planned timeline of 2024 as per the national fuel policy, 2015. The BS-VI norms are fuel neutral, where there is no disparity in emission gases irrespective of fuel usage, which could have been the trigger on policy makers to decide on leap frogging from BS-IV to BS-VI.
Amidst announcement of change in the emission norms compliance to BS-VI in 2016, all OEMs, component OEMs and accessory manufacturers had an uphill task to get them prepared, validated to adopt the change compared to a similar situation which took 9 years to implement in Europe which was a well-developed matured market. At this juncture, the hastened transition is going leave scars in the industry in terms of dip in demand for new vehicles due to price surges, OEMs trying to pass on the transitional cost on the product pricing, performance issues on the new BS-VI vehicles, transporters trying to go back to their old vehicles, meaning retention of old vehicles for longer periods, overloading scenarios getting witnessed for a couple of years. Only the stringent regulations clamping vehicle overloading, old vehicle scrapping policies incentives, EV / hybrid aided implementation activities can drive the future demand for commercial vehicles.
The current transitional time frame is a critical moment for the CV industry, with Indian manufacturers getting aligned to global markets/supply chain, further creating opportunities for home-grown component manufacturers to export globally on volumes of scale. The current scenario witnesses OEMs trying to plug in expertise’s available globally, going forward we could see more of developments, R&D activities on simplifying emission control equipment, automotive embedded solutions for betterment. We see the Industry witnessing amalgamation of electronics, information technologies in improvising the deep-rooted mechanical engines, further advancement in electrical vehicles we can see operating commercial vehicles reaching new scales of advancement getting prepared for autonomous driving post year 2030.
The long-asked question being the availability of BS-VI fuel (reduced sulphur content by 10 parts per million) by Indian refineries, looks like the refineries are quite confident of achieving throughout the retail channels across India starting to clean up the system from September 2019 onwards so that there is no poor quality fuel in the system. On the contrary as a back-up the government also mandates BS-VI vehicles should be able to run on BS-IV fuels as well. To counter this, the OEMs have tweaked their ECM (engine control module), exhaust gas treatment devices to handle poor quality fuels.
The other key factor of question ponders about the impact of engine oil in case of usage of poor fuel in BS-VI compliant engine, do the OEMs advice on shorter drainage periods or add special mixes to address this concern.
Essentially BS-VI fuel availability across India is mandatory and not restricted only at key cities, else OEMs are going to collect data on the vehicle performance issues and argue for possible relaxations in this transitional phase.
The current Motor Vehicle Bill 2019 (Amendment) implementation will ensure checks on emission controls during the periodic fitness test certification which mandates automated testing process, heavier penalties on owners violating safety and environmental regulations. Hence it’s essential that the right fuel is available across.
While vehicle sale numbers are already witnessing a drop in the pre-implementation period, dealers are not acccepting BS-IV vehicles over fears of non-saleability post April 2020. The scenario likely to continue unlike the BS-III to BS-IV active pre buying, reasons being of excess inventory of vehicles underlying unutilised, possible expected reduction in resale value on BS-IV branded vehicles, added unforeseen penalties on lower emission vehicles.
Post implementation period is also likely to have lesser vehicle sale numbers for a couple of quarters in the financial year (FY) 2020-21, on reasons of price surge, availability of vehicle variants with new norms. However, it is expected to regularise by the third quarter of FY 2020-2021.
The real CV industry revival is expected only when there are clear incentives to trade in old generation vehicle for low emission, energy / fuel efficient vehicles, with accredited operational benefits to transporters / logistics companies arriving from fuel efficiency-savings, higher vehicle uptime, low cost servicing achieved thru various electronic embedded systems & IT integrations.
By Rajesh Khanna, CEO, RACE Innovations Pvt. Ltd.