Normally, cylinder pressure was used as a criterion of combustion occurrence, while in some conditions, it may be unreliable when identifying lean mixture combustion. This is particularly important for fuels like liquefied petroleum gas, which has good capacity for lean combustion. In this study, a fast response NO detector, based on the chemiluminescence method, was used to measure real time NO emissions in order to evaluate the technique as a criterion for establishing combustion occurrence. Test results show that real time NO emissions can be used to identify the cylinder combustion and misfire occurrence during engine cranking, and real time NO emissions can be used to understand the combustion and misfire occurrence. Real time NO emissions mostly happened in first several cycles during cold start, and NO emissions increased with the spark timing advancing.