California Air Resources Board

Background and Objective

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) conducts a variety of vehicle emissions testing programs to better understand vehicular emissions and their impact on air quality, climate change and public health. Since January 2016, CARB has conducted the Truck and Bus Surveillance Program (TBSP) to evaluate the emissions from a range of in-use heavy-duty (HD) vehicles. This program tests heavy-duty trucks and buses with gross vehicle weight ratings (GVWR) between 14,000 and 80,000 lbs.

The testing program is modeled after CARB’s In-Use Vehicle Surveillance Program (VSP), which has been measuring emissions from light-duty vehicles for over 20 years. The primary objective of a surveillance program is to determine a “snapshot” of the emissions from the statewide fleet. The key programmatic driver and main objective of the TBSP is to provide a systemic dataset to support emissions inventory improvement and better understand the deterioration of emission control systems of model year (MY) 2010 and newer on-road HD engines. The TBSP specifically assesses the real-world effectiveness of heavy-duty vehicle emission control systems such as diesel particulate filters (DPF) and selective catalytic reduction (SCR) systems. With this type of information, more cost-effective regulations and strategies for reducing heavy-duty vehicle emissions can be developed.

Contact

If you have further questions, please contact the TBSP Project Engineer, Dr. Reddy Yatavelli at (626)-575-6620; Lead Test Engineer, Wayne Sobieralski at (916) 229-0368, Robert Ianni at (916) 229-0358; or Section Manager, Dr. Shaohua Hu or (916)-612-6065.