Fuel efficiency and pollution reduction relate closely to air-ratio (i.e. lambda) among all of the automotive engine control variables. Accurate lambda prediction is essential for effective lambda control. This paper presents an online sequential algorithm for relevance vector machine (RVM) to build a time-dependent RVM lambda function which can be continually updated whenever a sample is added to, or removed from, the training dataset. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the online sequential algorithm, three lambda time series obtained from experiments under different engine operating conditions were employed. The prediction results under the online sequential algorithm over unseen cases were compared with those under decremental least-squares support vector machine. From the experiments, the online sequential RVM shows promising results and is superior to the typical online algorithm. © 2012 IEEE.