The new European Legislation requires new strategies in order to achieve a reliable emission diagnostic over the entire life of the vehicle (EOBD).
For the validation and the fine-tuning of the new diagnostic controls, the car manufacturers must manage fleets of vehicles in order to evaluate the behavior of these diagnostics over a real aging cycle.
This paper describes a useful tool that has been developed to check the most important diagnostic indexes behavior with aging, that help us in the management of a durability fleet.
The system is composed of:
a specific hardware added to the Engine Control Unit (ECU)
a real time software for the automatic storage of the most important diagnostic parameters
an off line software for data analysis.
During the use of durability car the system runs automatically and does not require any additional operation to the driver (“black-box system”), and no additional skilled people is required for the data acquisition.
Periodically data of each car of the fleet are collected and stored in a personal computer where an expert engineer will analyze the behavior of the fleet with the off line software.