It is long overdue that the United States and the European Union join together to develop some shared regulations that could cover a much larger are of the world, especially with respect to emissions and environmental sustainability.
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers told United States and European Union negotiating teams that the industry will sponsor a study by leading research institutions to demonstrate equivalence between certain American and European auto regulations. The Alliance, along with the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) and the American Automotive Policy Council (AAPC), have been actively engaged with U.S. and E.U. governments to seek a vital regulatory harmonization component to a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement.
Regulatory differences between the U.S. and E.U. can act as non-tariff barriers to trade, effectively putting a “trade tax” of 25 percent or more on products sold across the Atlantic, according to a recent European impact assessment. Harmonization in automobile-related regulations is an issue of economic vitality, according to the Auto Alliance. Compliance with diverse national environmental and vehicle safety standards imposes engineering, design, and manufacturing constraints that can raise costs to consumers.
The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, will conduct a study, in partnership with SAFER, a transportation research center at Chalmers University, located in Gothenburg, Sweden. Researchers will examine the degree to which vehicles produced to U.S. safety standards can be expected to provide essentially equivalent real-world safety benefits when driven on European roadways as provided by vehicles produced to E.U. standards (and vice-versa for E.U.-certified vehicles when driven on U.S. roadways).
SAFER is a joint research unit comprised of 25 partner organizations that have participated in a large number of E.U. projects on traffic safety, including in-depth data collection projects such as PENDANT, SafetyNet and DaCoTA and the major Field Operational Tests (FOTs) such as euroFOT and DriveC2X plus the networking project FOTnet. UMTRI is a national leader in transportation data and analysis with over 40 years of experience with analysis of national crash datasets in the US to understand both injury risk and benefits of a variety of crashworthiness as well as crash avoidance technologies.
With any luck, these two representatives can come to some major agreements that could have the potential to drastically change availability and trade policies between the United States and the European Union.
