EURO 7 OBM Data Collection System
Project duration: 2025
Project partner: Emisia, LAT
Funding: EU Commission (DG Grow)
Project team: Quaritsch, Martini, Rexeis
The Euro 7 regulation marks the European Union’s next major step in tightening vehicle emission standards to support cleaner air and climate objectives. Building upon the Euro 6 framework, Euro 7 extends its scope to cover a wider range of pollutants and introduces stricter limits on both exhaust and non-exhaust emissions, including particulate matter from brakes and tires. It applies uniformly to passenger cars, vans, trucks, and buses, with the aim of ensuring that all vehicle categories contribute to reducing overall pollutant levels across the transport sector.
A core innovation in Euro 7 is the integration of advanced On-Board Monitoring (OBM) and Over-the-Air (OTA) data transmission systems. OBM technology continuously measures and evaluates the performance of a vehicle’s emission-control systems during normal operation, allowing early detection of degradation or malfunction. This real-time data collected on all vehicles in the fleet significantly enhance the possibility for surveillance that vehicles remain compliant with emission thresholds throughout their entire lifespan.
Complementing this, OTA data transmission enables remote data collection, analysis, and verification by regulatory authorities. The signals to be monitored and the OBM data collection process on the vehicle as well as the binary data format for the OTA OBM data blocks to be transmitted are already defined in Regulation (EU) 2025/1707. On average, every 64th trip is recorded in the OTA outbox and an OBM data block contains 5 trips. This binary OBM data block is then transmitted in a first step over-the-air to the vehicle manufacturer.
The scope of this project is to develop, describe and analyze technical options to enable a robust, reliable and scalable process for the digital submission of anonymized OBM data from vehicle manufacturers to authorities, both for light- and heavy-duty Euro 7 vehicles. The first option is that the vehicle manufacturers send the OBM data to a server at the member states in a first step. In a second step the OBM data is collected at a central server at the European Commission for overall EU-wide evaluation and monitoring. The second option is that the vehicle manufacturers send the OBM data directly to a central server operated by the European Commission (see Figure3). Member states, the Technical Services and all other stake holders have access to this central database. The first approach turned out to be significantly more challenging from an organizational and administrative perspective already in the early analysis phase. A cost-benefit analysis shows that the first approach is also more resource intensive, both for setting up the system and during operation.
Figure3: OBM data collection via a centralized server
Therefore, the focus in this project is on the second, centralized solution. Throughout this project we work out the use-cases how different stakeholders interact with the system and what are the requirements of the stakeholders as well as the requirements for the whole system. The use-cases include transmitting OBM data from vehicle manufacturers to the central database system, analyzing the available OBM data for in-service conformity and market surveillance as well as querying odometer readings over time. The interface for the central database system will be REST based. We work out the detailed design of the REST API with all required end-points, access privileges and data structures. Once the Euro 7 standard is implemented in the majority of vehicles, the annual data volume is estimated around 800 GB. The implemented solution must therefore be scalable and provide sufficient storage capacity and computing power.