CLEPA, the association of European automotive suppliers, issued its recommendations on Monday, 27 April, just as negotiations on the Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) are getting underway.
In particular, it calls on the European Parliament and the Council of the EU to “lower the eligibility threshold for foreign direct investment in the battery and EV value chain to reflect industrial realities”, since the proposed investment threshold of €100 million for the battery and electric vehicle value chain “risks excluding a significant share of investments made by the automotive supplier industry”.
[The association points out,] “Europe’s automotive suppliers are responsible for [...] 75% of a vehicle’s total value. However, an increasingly unfair global playing field is putting up to 350,000 local jobs at [...] risk”.
“The IAA is not the silver bullet; other structural measures need to be considered in order to keep the core of automotive innovation firmly anchored in Europe”, says CLEPA, which makes some recommendations: maintain high local content requirements (minimum threshold of 70%) for defining a ‘European vehicle’; apply “a targeted and risk-based approach to all trade partners, supporting genuine industrial cooperation, including UK and EFTA countries”; harmonise vehicle eligibility criteria across all mechanisms, “including tying super-credits to at least 70% EU content”; ensure that cheaper non-European vehicles do not circumvent EU-origin requirements by setting a threshold that is too low; and expand the scope of the measures to cover a larger share of the market.
More information: https://aeur.eu/f/lqe (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)