Nine lorries with reprogrammed engine control units designed to bypass emissions controls were identified in Villorba, in the province of Treviso, by local police, who released the results of three days of inspections on 29 October 2026. According to officers, the tampering involved the software of Euro VI heavy goods vehicles. The checks, carried out by the Postumia Romana inter-municipal local police force and targeting foreign vehicles engaged in international road haulage, also uncovered a tampered tachograph in a Serbian lorry, driver cards belonging to other people used by two drivers from the same Romanian company, and faulty tachographs in five vehicles from Eastern Europe.
Officers also recorded breaches of driver posting regulations, transport documentation requirements, vehicle roadworthiness rules and speed limits. The total fines exceeded €20,000. Meanwhile, in Friuli Venezia Giulia, motorway operator Autostrade Alto Adriatico announced on 4 November 2025 that it had purchased five devices capable of detecting tampered electronic control units, particularly in vehicles where AdBlue systems and diesel particulate filters had been disabled or bypassed. The devices were made available to the traffic police and used during inspections at the Palmanova toll plaza on the A4 motorway.
The European Commission's Joint Research Centre, in a 2022 study involving two Euro VI lorries, two Euro 6 diesel cars and an agricultural tractor, found that tampering with the SCR system can increase nitrogen oxide emissions by more than tenfold. For the two lorries, with their engines at operating temperature, emissions increased by between 7 and 28 times for the N2-category vehicle and between 50 and 220 times for the N3-category vehicle.
