The Transport Committee members today adopted an amendment excluding all L-category vehicles, including motorcycles, from the scope of the proposed new legislation on Periodic Technical Inspections.
Following the opinion expressed by the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee last month, the all-important Transport Committee members today adopted an amendment excluding all L-category vehicles, including motorcycles, from the scope of the proposed new legislation on Periodic Technical Inspections. This illustrates that the European Parliament is following FEMA’s views on the need for solid and unbiased evidence before imposing new costs on EU citizens. With both the Council of Ministers and the Parliament against the Commission’s plans, this could represent a major victory for FEMA on mandatory PTI.
Since the beginning of the discussion in the European Parliament over the new proposal for harmonizing periodical technical tests throughout Europe, Commission’s statistics have been consistently challenged by FEMA which highlighted the critical difference between PTWs accident numbers – acknowledged to be too high – and statistics regarding the causation of these accidents, with less than 1% due to technical failures in all neutral studies.
A couple of weeks ago, the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) committee formally rejected statistics suggesting that compulsory PTI would reduce motorcycle accident rates and excluded the entire L-category from the scope of the text. But this was only an “opinion”
Today, despite a strong opposition from the Socialists and the Greens, the Transport Committee (TRAN) agreed with IMCO views and similarly excluded PTWs from the scope of the Commission text while asking for more unbiased evidence with the following amendment being adopted: No later than [three years from the date of publication of this Regulation], the Commission shall submit a report to the European Parliament and the Council on the inclusion of two- or three-wheel vehicles into the scope of this Regulation. The report shall assess the road safety situation for that category of vehicles in the European Union. In particular, the Commission shall compare road safety results for that category of vehicles in Member States carrying out roadworthiness testing of that category of vehicles with those in Member States which do not test that category of vehicles in order to assess whether roadworthiness testing of the two- or three-wheel vehicles is proportionate to the set road s afety objectives. The report shall be accompanied, if appropriate, by legislative proposals.
The TRAN vote took place on Thursday May 30 at the European Parliament. In view of the political context with regards to road safety and the strong lobby work of the technical inspections industry, FEMA considers this decision as being unexpected and is extremely positive about the sense of democracy demonstrated by a majority of MEPs.
FEMA will keep a very attentive eye on the evolution of the procedure as the final vote will take place in Plenary Session beginning of July.
Editor: FEMA