Bureau of Energy Efficiency have extended their policy to cars also, after electronics items. Yes, from 01st April 2013 your car will come with a star rating label mentioning how efficient your car is. This will be the first step towards standardization of regulatory norms to force companies to be friendly to nature. Within 2-3 months companies may start labeling their cars voluntarily.
“There will be a well-defined methodology for testing and common benchmarking. The thinking is that we will go for voluntary labeling immediately and mandatory labeling from next year,” Ajay Mathur, director-general, BEE, said.
The labeling will be done on the scale of 1 to 5, where 5 being most fuel efficient and 1 being least fuel efficient. The classification has been done on the basis of fuel consumed per 100 kms, as follows –
– 5 Star: upto 7 liters/100 km
– 4 Star: 7-9 liters/100 km
– 3 Star: 9-11 liters/100 km
– 2 Star: 11-12 liter/ 100 km
– 1 Star: 12 + liter/100 km
It is not clear whether they are going to take ARAI figures or they will be setting their own criteria and test parameters. As per the consultation paper submitted for this, officials have mentioned that out of altogether 330 car models in India, 32 fall within the five-star category, while 52 in four-star category which is comparatively less fuel efficient.
Star labeling is not the end and BEE is going to take it further with a new regulation to maintain corporate average below specified levels. Corporate average or Fleet average is the average star rating of all cars offered by company in India. So every company must have product which is most fuel efficient if they want to have a gas guzzling beast in their portfolio. This regulation will come into effect by 2015 and it will be taken to the next stage in 2020. This will balance out the equation also and seems to be good move to curb increasing number of pollution and increasing number of gas guzzlers.