It's a basic work to study the characteristics of vehicular emissions and give emission factors for development of vehicular emission inventory and decision-making of the control strategies. On-board emission measurements of on-road vehicles are regarded as important complementary to emission laboratory dynamometer tests. On-board exhaust emission measurements were conducted on seven samples of gasoline cars in a typical road in Macao, using AVL DiGas 4000 light five-gas analyzer. It was found that there was an obvious reduction of gaseous pollutant emissions from cars equipped with electronic fuel injection and three-way catalytic converter system (referred to as EFI cars in the following), compared to old carburetor cars. The average volume concentrations of CO, HC and NO of carburetor cars were 227 x 10(-6), 1.57% and 1477 x 10(-6), respectively, while those of EFI cars were 33 x 10(-6), 0.21% and 131 x 10(-6), which were about 1/11 through 1/7 of the former. However, there were high emissions during the cold start of EFI cars. The arithmetical mean concentrations of CO and NO emissions of EFI cars were calculated and their absolute values were predominantly contributed by high concentrations with low frequency. Furthermore, the emission factors of gasoline cars were estimated by test data, and at the same time, MOBILES model was used to calculate average emission factors of gasoline cars in Macao in 2000. The ratios between the results calculated by model and estimated by experiment data were in the range of 59%-139%, which would narrow into 68%-132% if only annual average emission factors were compared. The results suggest that EFI + TWC systems equipped in vehicles have good effect on the emission reduction, but catalytic converters are not activated during the cold start. Technical improvement of EFI cars, which could reduce the occurrence of high emissions with low frequency during the operation, would decrease their average level on exhaust emissions a lot. Furthermore, it's reliable that the emission factors of gasoline cars in Macao calculated by modified MOBILES model.