Petrol Engines are Producing High Levels of Killer Emissions

• Petrol Engines are Producing High Levels of Killer Emissions

A year after Volkswagen cars were found to be emitting unusual high levels of harmful diesel emissions, new research has warned that a similar issue could hit petrol vehicles too.

United Kingdom, U.K. based, Green campaign group, Transport and Environment, said small petrol engines are producing high levels of emission particles outside of lab conditions that could “kill hundreds of thousands of citizens prematurely.”

But despite this, car manufacturers want to avoid fitting expensive gasoline particulate filters (GPFs) to exhausts of unleaded models, Daily mail said in a report.

The emissions produced by small petrol are different to those emitted by diesel. While high levels of nitrogen oxides (NOx) caused for concern on the VW diesel emissions scandal, it’s ‘lung-cancer causing’ particulate matter (PM) produced by petrol-car exhausts now put the public at risk, the environmental group warned.

According to the campaigners, the problem is easily solvable with the addition of a GPF, but manufacturers are reluctant to fit them.

One carmaker that is keeping its nose clean by committing to using GPFs on its small petrol vehicles is Volkswagen, which has already confirmed it will be fitting the filters to all its TSI and TFSI turbo engines from next year as a new official test procedure looms.

The new exhaust emissions regulations are due to be introduced in 2018, to tackle the problem of particulate emissions from modern turbo petrol cars.

Research has found that the combination of high engine temperatures, high-pressure injection and the greater loads cars experience in real-world driving mean many produce more PM in the hands of the public than they do when driven on rolling roads in test conditions.

Clean Vehicles Engineer at Transport & Environment, Florent Grelier, said: “Until now the appalling air pollution in our cities has been largely caused by diesel vehicles fitted with cheap, ineffective exhaust treatment that pumped out nitrogen oxide emissions over five times the legal limit.”