The Development of a Cold Weather Driveability Test Cycle for Fuel Injected Vehicles

Cold weather driveability has mainly been assessed in Europe using the CEC M-08-T-83 procedure. This was developed in the 1970's for a vehicle population mainly equipped with carburetted engines. However, modern cars equipped with fuel injected engines and electronic engine management systems show very few driveability problems in the CEC test, making it difficult to show significant differences in driveability performance between cars or fuels. Shell Research have developed a new cold weather driveability test cycle for use on climate-controlled chassis dynamometers. Tests in a number of fuel-injected vehicles have shown more demerits than in the CEC test under the same conditions. The new cycle is therefore more useful for demonstrating differences in cold weather driveability where the CEC cycle produces demerit levels close to zero.