Natural gas is considered today a real alternative to diesel for the use in commercial vehicles in Europe, China, India and United States.
While in Brazil natural gas is often the energy source for industrial processes and passenger's cars, opportunities to extend its utilization in light, medium commercial vehicles and buses could become realty in Brazil and Latin America.
At the date, most of 12.000 IVECO CNG vehicles are running in different European countries and different customers' applications mainly refuse collection, urban logistics and urban people transport.
Trucks running with Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) represent today an opportunity to improve quality of life for communities, reducing the pollutant and noise emissions and allow, for the fleets operators, a cost saving directly related to fuel.
In the 2011 IVECO Latin America started a CNG program to introduce CNG technology into Brazilian market. This program is involving light and medium trucks and one bus (12 meters length).
This work relates the development of 16 tons CNG medium truck 4×2 prototype dedicated to garbage collection application. The vehicle, which uses a FPT 6 liter CNG Otto Cycle engine, has been tested for 6 months customer field test and demonstrates performances and productivity close to diesel vehicles allowing a cost saving and reduction in noise and gases emissions.