The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) welcomes the European Commission’s proposal for a regulation on the monitoring and reporting of CO2 emissions and fuel consumption of new heavy-duty vehicles, but is concerned about a possible requirement to reveal sensitive technical data.
The industry supports the Commission’s objective to increase transparency in the market regarding CO2 emissions from heavy-duty vehicles, thereby also contributing to the further decarbonization of road transport in Europe.
Truck manufacturers are, however, concerned by the suggestion to aggregate and disclose certain confidential and technically sensitive data through a database accessible to the general public – especially when it comes to the aerodynamic performance of a truck, the so-called “CdxA value.” As this position paper shows, making such data publicly available to competitors would severely hurt the competitiveness of the European truck industry, in Europe and abroad.
In addition, further clarification is needed regarding the scope of the proposal and the definition of the production date of a vehicle, and to ensure that the disclosure of the average fuel consumption per manufacturer is done in a comparable way.
ACEA fully supports that information on the fuel consumption and CO2 emissions of complete vehicles, as calculated by the VECTO tool1, should be made publicly available. Fuel consumption information is key to enabling vehicle operators to make well-informed purchasing decisions, as they can easily identify which vehicle performs perform best in terms of fuel consumption.
To that end, the VECTO tool will provide customers with values indicating the CO2 emissions and fuel consumption of a new truck. That comes on top of the fact that all truck manufacturers already share technical, confidential data about individual vehicles with their customers on a bilateral basis.
The position paper is available here.