(a) Upon petition from a manufacturer or upon the Agency's own initiative, the Administrator will approve a simulation of the environmental cell for air conditioning test (SC03) described in §86.160-00 providing that the procedure can be run by the Administrator for SEA and in-use enforcement testing and providing that the following criteria are met:

(1) In deciding whether approvals will be granted, the Administrator will consider data showing how well the simulation matches environmental cell test data for the range of vehicles to be covered by the simulation including items such as the tailpipe emissions, air conditioning compressor load, and fuel economy.

(2) For any simulation approved under paragraph (a) of this section, the manufacturer must agree to be subject to an ongoing yearly correlation spot check as described in §86.163-00.

(3) Once a simulation is approved and used by a manufacturer for testing for a given vehicle, EPA agrees to use the simulation test procedure for all official testing conducted on that vehicle by the Agency for certification, SEA, and recall purposes, excluding spot check testing and vehicles which fail the spot check criteria as described in §86.163-00.

(4) EPA will moniter the aggregate results of spot check testing and full environmental test cells. If EPA determines, based on such aggregate results, that any simulation is producing test results consistantly below those from a full environmental test cell, EPA may review its approval of the simulation.

(b) [Reserved]

[61 FR 54899, Oct. 22, 1996]