Abstract
Since the middle 80's, acomparative labelling program for energy consumption of domestic appliances has been implemented in Brazil, which is now extended to vehicles. This program is coordinated and ruled by INMETRO - Brazilian Government Institute for Metrology, Standardization and Industrial Quality, with the participation of other Brazilian Government Programs for energy and fuels conservation, the automotive industry and PETROBRAS the Brazilian Petroleum Company. Since 2005, a vehicle task-force group has been working on the vehicle test and classification protocols, where specific requirements were included to consider a variety of fuels, including flex fuel vehicles, in a single comparison basis, since most new cars are flex fuel in Brazil. For this purpose, the fuel consumption is measured according to a Brazilian Standard based on the US-FTP-75 and highway test procedures, converted to energy basis, in MJ/km, and the final number is ranked within each vehicle category. This Program was simulated in more than one hundred vehicles in 2008 and has started in 2009 in a voluntary basis. Once inscribed in the Program, the voluntary manufacturer must submit at least 50% of vehicle models to be tested, approved, classified and labelled before commercialization. For market surveillance and control, a sample of the production models is selected every year to be rested by INMETRO's accredited laboratories network. The classification is divided into 5 levels, A to E, based on the median value which defines the central range. In addition, INMETRO is developing a complementary approach to evaluate the CO2 emission, which is barely independent of fuel type (gasohol @ 22%ethanol, or hydrated ethanol or even any intermediate blend of both) when expressed in g/km, but the fraction of renewable carbon varies from 15% up to 100% in the flex fuel vehicle, depending on the customer choice of fuels. KEYWORDS: fuel economy, energy efficiency, CO2 emission, labelling, efficiency