China II, III, V and VI: what the emission standard means for your import

Every truck on this site carries a line reading China II / III / V, or on one of them China VI. Most buyers read past it. It is the specification most likely to decide whether your truck clears customs, and it is worth ten minutes.

What the stages are

China’s emission standards for heavy diesel vehicles run in numbered stages, each tighter than the last, in the same way Euro 1 through Euro 6 do in Europe. They are not a quality rating and they are not a measure of how good the truck is. They are a limit on what comes out of the exhaust, set at the time the vehicle was built.

Here is when each stage took effect for all sales and registrations of heavy-duty diesel vehicles in China.

China VI is the big step. It is stated as roughly a 70% reduction in nitrogen oxides and particulates against China V, and it brought in on-road testing with portable equipment and remote monitoring, rather than only a laboratory cycle.

What this means in practice is that the stage tells you roughly when a truck was built and how it is aftertreated. A China III truck is a simpler machine. A China VI truck carries more emissions equipment, needs the right fuel and needs someone who can service that equipment.

Why a used truck says “China II / III / V”

Buyers ask this often, and the answer is not evasive.

The stages are national requirements that came in on dates. A truck built in 2020 was built to whatever was required in 2020 for its category, and Chinese manufacturers also built to older stages for export markets and for regions inside China with later deadlines. So a model line spanning several years spans several stages, and the catalogue prints the range the line covers rather than a figure for one vehicle.

The stage of your specific truck is a property of your specific truck. It is on the plate. Ask us to photograph it, and ask for it to be named on the Proforma Invoice. That is the only version of this figure worth relying on.

The part that decides whether your truck lands

Here is where we have to be careful, and where most pages like this one quietly stop being trustworthy.

Import rules for used vehicles vary enormously by country, and they change. The United Nations Environment Programme surveyed 146 countries that import used vehicles and found that most of them regulate the trade weakly or not at all, that at least 79 have no age restriction whatsoever, and that 30 of those 79 are in Africa. Twenty African countries do set a maximum age. Morocco, for example, is cited as permitting imports under five years old and meeting a Euro 4 equivalent.

Two things follow from that, and both matter to you.

First, there is no general answer. Two neighbouring countries can have completely different rules, one of them can change theirs this year, and a rule that applied to your last shipment may not apply to your next one.

Second, and this is the trap: most published rules cover passenger cars. The UNEP work above is a study of light-duty vehicles. Commercial vehicle rules frequently differ from car rules in the same country, and it is the commercial rule that applies to a tipper or a tractor unit. A buyer who reads their country’s car import age limit and assumes it covers a 40-tonne prime mover is reading the wrong regulation.

So we are not going to publish a table of country limits. A wrong duty rate or a wrong age limit in a blog post is the same class of error as a wrong spec, and it is worse in one way: a wrong spec is discovered when the machine arrives, and a wrong regulation is believed right up until it strands a truck at a port.

Tell us your country and we will check the current position for your shipment before you commit. That is a real offer and it is the only honest form this section can take.

What to do with this, concretely

Find out what your country requires for used commercial vehicles, not for cars, from your own customs authority or a clearing agent who handles trucks. Do this before you choose a machine, not after.

Then match the machine to it. If your rule is tight on age or emissions, our newest stock is where to look: the FAW J6P is new, China VI and automatic, and the short-bodied HOWO 8×4 tipper is China V at 380 hp. If your rule is open, a China III truck is a simpler and cheaper machine and there is nothing wrong with buying one.

Get the stage named on the Proforma Invoice, with a photograph of the plate. An emission standard agreed in a WhatsApp message is not a document.

Ask about fuel. Later-stage engines assume a fuel quality. If the diesel available where you operate is not that, a simpler engine may genuinely serve you better, and that is a conversation worth having before you buy the cleanest truck on the page.

The honest summary

Newer stage is not automatically better for you. It is better for the air, it is better if your country regulates on it, and it is worse if your fuel is poor or your workshops cannot service the aftertreatment. What is always better is knowing which stage your actual truck is, in writing, before you pay.

The China VI truck we hold → · The China V tipper → · How buying works →