In order to sell their cars in the European Union and United States, automakers have to comply with two different crash-test procedures coordinated by the Euro NCAP (European New Car Assessment Program) and IIHS (The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety), respectively.
Naturally, that means more money spent on re-engineering cars to satisfy the two different crash-test standards, and automakers believe they could save hundreds of millions of dollars in costs if the crash-test standards were unified through a free-trade deal.
According to an Autonews report, to help them press their case, car manufacturers are asking academics to find common ground between US and EU standards. Lobbyists for carmakers from both sides of the Atlantic asked the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and SAFER, a transportation research group at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden, to help convince authorities of the benefits of unified safety standards.
“Regulators tend to believe that their standards are the best. They have ‘not-invented-here syndrome,’” said Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, an US lobbying group whose members include General Motors, Toyota and Volkswagen. “We want to show them that our standards may differ in some modest ways, but the ones that we’re looking at harmonizing are essentially equivalent,” Bergquist added.
The Michigan institute and SAFER will gather data and come up with a methodology by late April or early May. The academics would then conduct an analysis and finish their report by the end of 2014, when the US and EU are hoping to finalize the free-trade deal.
By Dan Mihalascu
Story References: Automotive News
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