Brussels, 04/02/2002 (Agence Europe) - The European Consumers' Organisation (BEUC) has sent all the European Commissioners a letter in which it calls for the scrapping of the current car dealer scheme and also for the scrapping of the exclusive geographical system. BEUC has learnt that the Commission is intending to make the current regulation less binding (the Commission is due to unveil its plans on Tuesday and following consultation with stakeholders, they will be adopted before the summer in order to come into force on 1 October 2002) and while reacting positively to the proposed orientations, it calls on the Commission to do more to open up the market. In its letter, BEUC hails the Commission's proposal to allow dealers the right to sell cars from different manufacturers in the same showroom and warmly welcomed the relaxing of the link between car sales and after-sales services. BEUC argues that authorised garages do not offer better quality services than independent garages, but they do charge higher prices so consumers would benefit from greater competition in terms of greater specialisation, flexibility and innovation in both sales and services. BEUC calls for the idea of exclusive geographical rights to be scrapped since they make dealers completely dependent on manufacturers, which encourages the fragmentation of the single market into fifteen national markets and consequently enormous pre-tax price differences between Member States. BEUC admits, however, that a degree of exclusivity might be useful in making dealers and service providers meet non-discriminatory standards and targets in terms of skills, expertise and training.