On Thursday 26 January, the European Commission published a raft of guidelines for assessing emissions reduction strategies and detecting the presence of invalidation devices during motor vehicle approval tests.
This will involve non-binding guidelines for member states and the national authorities responsible for detecting strategies for circumventing emission tests in laboratories, particularly the invalidation devices, as used by the German Volkswagen group.
These guidelines provide orientation on the basis of a protocol developed by the Commission and Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the national authorities for establishing whether these kinds of devices comply with European legislation. European rules allow for derogations on the ban on invalidation devices, particularly when the protection of motor vehicles is in question (article 5, § 2, regulation 715/2007).
To this end, the national authorities can revert to auxiliary emissions reduction strategies developed by the automobile manufacturers, explained the Commission in a guideline note. Manufacturers are effectively obliged, since 10 May 2016, to submit these strategies to the appropriate authorities for-type approval on the basis of the ‘RDE 2’ regulation (regulation 2016/646).
According to the guideline note, these recommendations were drafted on the basis of discussions between the experts from the “market monitoring” subgroup and the experts’ group from the authorities responsible for type-approval (TAAEG) together with the participation from European Commission services.
The vice is continuing to tighten around the automobile manufactures, but some believe, particularly the European Commission, that this is occurring only partially and too slowly. The Commission has been waiting for more than a year for the European Parliament and Council to produce a position on a draft regulation whose primary goal was to strengthen the monitoring and approval of motor vehicles (see EUROPE 11664). (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)