a Road Map for Safer Cars 2020
Recommendation 2 All UN Member States with significant automobile production should participate in the World Forum for Harmonisation of Vehicle Regulations to promote a levelling up of the safety standards in an open and competitive market for automobiles and their components. A very important way to increase the worldwide market for safety is to promote international trade in passenger cars and their components provided that they meet good standards of consumer safety. The World Forum (which meets in the UN Palais des Nations in Geneva) encourages trade through reciprocal recognition of vehicle approvals. Increased harmonisation of standards should, in principle, help to reduce industry costs, promote economies of scale, lower prices to the consumer and promote safety. That is why Global NCAP strongly supports wider engagement in both the World Forum’s 1958 and 1998 Agreements by all UN Member States especially middle income countries now have significant automobile production such as Brazil, China and India. These countries, and especially their own citizens, will benefit from applying the minimum safety regulations proposed in this Road Map. Bilateral trade agreements, such as the proposed EU-US Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP), could be beneficial on condition that they must level up to the best standards applied by either negotiating party. There is already a high degree of equivalence between European type approval and American FMVSS requirements. Both the EU and the USA have at times led the other in pioneering safety innovation. For example, the EU has promoted pedestrian protection and the US similarly legislated first and also initiated a UN GTR for ESC. Despite their different approval systems (type approval vs self-certification) if the TTIP is achieved it would create the world’s largest single market for safer passenger cars. Nevertheless, the rest of the world will be a
far larger market and less adequately regulated given the rapid growth of production and sales in middle income countries. That is why Global NCAP urges both the EU and the USA to strongly support the widest possible adoption by 2020 of the proposed minimum safety standards recommended in this Road Map and also encourage adherence by all major middle income vehicle producing countries to the World Forum’s 1958 and 1998 Agreements. The trade in key safety components such as airbags and crash avoidance technologies is also an important issue. OEMs buy in these components from the supplier industry and prices can be influenced significantly by the trade rules applied to them. Middle income countries run the risk that use of import restrictions and local content rules may add to the cost of safety technologies. Whilst it may seem attractive for a country to incentivise its local automotive industry by applying import protection measures this may have the perverse effect of making safer vehicles more expensive and slow down penetration of technologies that will save the lives of their own citizens. Global NCAP believes that key safety technologies such as airbags, child restraints and ESC systems should wherever possible be exempted from import restrictions. Overall Global NCAP supports the development of an open and competitive global market for automobiles and their components, underpinned by universally applied minimum UN safety standards and driven by informed and safety aware consumers.
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