Commission proposes vehicle emissions limits for 2020

German car companies win concessions.

The European Commission yesterday (11 July) published a long-awaited proposal to limit average car fleet emissions to 95 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre (g/km) by 2020. The proposal contains changes from an earlier draft, following objections from the German car industry, but the changes only partly address these concerns.

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This limit was already provided for in legislation adopted in 2009, but remained subject to confirmation by the Commission. At the time, an interim target was set for manufacturers to cut their average fleet emissions to 130 g/km for cars by 2015.

The Commission yesterday also published a proposal to set a 2020 emissions limit of 147 g/km for vans, tightening the 175 g/km limit for 2017 that was set in 2010.

The sector has been split on whether to support the proposed 2020 limit for cars. The battle has centred largely on the method of distributing the permitted emissions across the manufacturers’ fleets according to the cars’ weight. The formula for this was painstakingly worked out in a Franco-German compromise in 2008.

The German car industry, which specialises in larger, heavier cars, was furious when it saw a draft of the legislation by the Commission’s climate action department that updated the formula’s ‘base year’ to 2009 – from the 2006 base year in the 2009 legislation. The German companies said this would unfairly penalise them for improvements made between those years.

The German companies also said the curve factor – a key value for determining how far emissions have to be reduced, based on a car’s weight – should remain the same as in the previous legislation, at 0.0457. The earlier draft set this value at 0.0296, making the target less challenging for small cars and more challenging for large cars. Critics in Germany have accused the proposal of being a gift to struggling French and Italian carmakers, who specialise in smaller, mass-produced cars.

The proposal, now formalised, moves the base year back to 2006 as requested by Germany and raises the curve factor – but not by as much as the Germans wanted. The curve factor has been set at 0.0333.

Balanced deal

Connie Hedegaard, the European commissioner for climate action, told reporters yesterday that she sees this as a fair solution. “It will ensure that we maintain the balance agreed back in 2009, by asking all manufacturers to make the same relative effort to reduce their car emissions,” she said. “And that means a 27% reduction by all.”

But the compromise came under attack from both sides. German Liberal MEP Holger Krahmer accused Hedegaard of conducting “a covert industrial policy”. He said the proposal’s curve factor would “shift the costs of reducing CO2 within the car industry from those producers who primarily sell small cars to those who are successful in the higher category.”

“One could also say that this primarily benefits French and Italian firms and hurts German firms,” he added. “This means that for bigger cars, tougher limits will apply, tougher by up to 2.5 grams, which will be added to the long-term reduction target.”

By contrast, Patrik Ragnarsson of the European Aluminium Association, which is an advocate of lighter vehicles, said moving the base year back to 2006 damages the credibility of the legislation. “You should base any calculation on the current situation,” he said. “This will be a disincentive to lightweight cars, because you can add weight to a car and give yourself an easier target to reach.” His association plans to urge the European Parliament and member states to enable manufacturers to use a car’s footprint as a measurement instead of its mass.

French and Italian car companies have generally been supportive of more restrictive targets, while German companies have been resistant. “Yes, we can reach 95g, there is no problem, we have the technology,” said Philippe Doublet, a vice-president of Renault, in remarks at the Parliament on Tuesday. But “if we do not have regulation, the car industry will not follow at the right speed”.

The split has meant that the European car industry association, ACEA, has been unable to adopt a common position on the proposal. “The industry is diverse; the CO2-legislation is complex, and the cost implications are huge,” said ACEA secretary general Ivan Hodac on Wednesday.