The Member States’ ambassadors to the EU on Wednesday 21 April did not consider it necessary to revise the negotiating mandate to resume discussions with the European Parliament on the conformity factor in the framework of Regulation 715/2007 on type-approval of motor vehicles.
The Portuguese Presidency of the EU Council proposed two options for Member States to resume negotiations.
The first option suggested revising the mandate to take into account the Joint Research Centre (JRC) report published in February.
The second proposed to resume informal negotiations with Parliament at technical level without changing the Council’s mandate. The aim is to find “flexibilities” on the side of Parliament, which wants to impose a fixed date (30 September 2022) to definitively abolish the conformity factor in addition to introducing the margins revised by the JRC (see EUROPE 12615/36). The Member States, after an hour-and-a-half-long exchange of varied and sometimes opposing views, chose the second option.
However, this decision is not the result of a real consensus, we are told. The position of some large Member States, such as Germany, in favour of maintaining the current Council mandate, would have prevailed over the position of many smaller Member States (and without car manufacturers in their national economies), such as the Netherlands, in favour of the first option.
This decision does not augur well for a rapid and successful outcome of the negotiations between the Council and Parliament, given that the latter had already rejected the Council’s positions on the basis of the same mandate. The idea of some Member States, we are told, is to await the opinion of the Advocate General on the appeal against the judgment of the General Court which had rejected certain provisions of the second RDE act (see EUROPE 12273/3).
The February JRC report reduced the uncertainty margin for PEMS (portable emissions measurement system) measurements for NOx emissions to 0.23 for current equipment, with a possibility to reduce further (to 0.10) for equipment foreseen in Regulation 2017/1151. Similarly, the report proposed a reduction in the margin of error for particulate matter (PM) to 0.34 (currently 0.5). (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)