In Europe, the VECTO scheme was implemented in 2019 with first impacts on truck OEMs to come in 2025. It aims at monitoring, then reducing the CO2 emissions of trucks through financial penalties for OEMs if targets are not reached. The tire rolling resistance coefficient (RRC) is a key parameter in truck fuel consumption reduction for fleets’ cost efficiency and in the CO2 emissions reduction for global warming impact. As the tire is a lever easy to activate to reduce the CO2 score, the truck OEMs are requesting tire manufacturers to provide lower RRC tire, but the first tires to equip a new vehicle are specified by the fleet when purchasing a truck. Facts show that the low RRC tire are not selected by fleets since they know these tires have often a lower mileage and they are not able to precisely monitor the fuel gains through RRC effects. This leads to the well-known antagonism of low RRC tire requested by truck OEMs and not by fleets, as shown by the vehicle set monitoring enabled by VECTO database. Tire manufacturers are working actively to reconciliate these two expectations of low RRC and improved mileage, but it is theoretically proven that the LCA and TCO of trucks are better improved with low RRC tires than with high mileage tires. Then there is a need to make the fuel gains with low RRC tires more visible for fleets to better convince them. Michelin has been working for a while on the understanding of RRC impact on truck fuel consumption, and this paper shares a methodology of fuel consumption decomposition on real life CAN bus data to extract the effect of RRC and enable a fair comparison of fuel consumption of two trucks with different tires or of two trips with the same truck and different RRC tires. This study has been done on European and US tractor semi-trailer combinations and must be read in the continuity of the paper presented in HVTT16 and VDI 2021. © 2023 The Authors.
