New research by lobby group Transport and Environment debunks carmakers’ claims that Euro 7 standards won’t significantly improve the quality.
The truck industry organization ACEA says: ‘Significant progress has been made in the EU on reducing air pollution from vehicles, under the current Euro 6/VI standards. Euro 7 is unlikely to make much more of an impact and may even be counterproductive as it risks slowing down fleet renewal’. Europe’s auto industry is a leading driver of EU economic growth. The Euro 7 proposal means that certain vehicle models and segments could no longer be produced in the EU, risking progress on the industry’s green transition.
The Transport and Environment research shows that aligning car and truck NOx pollution limits with robust Euro 7 limits (i.e., 30mg/km for cars, 350 mg/kWh cold limit, and 90 mg/kWh hot limit for trucks-which were found to be the optimal policy option by the Euro 7 Impact Assessment) will reduce NO2 pollution from road transport in Brussels, Madrid, Milan, Paris, and Warsaw by around 50% by 2035. This will result in up to 24% lower concentrations of toxic NO2 in pollution hotspots in those cities in 2035.
The study also shows that without Euro 7 or other actions to reduce pollution, such as more stringent low- and zero-emission zones, Brussels, Madrid, Paris, and Warsaw are unable to comply with the NO2 limits proposed by the revision of the Ambient Air Quality Directive until after 2035.
In addition, greater ambition on brake pollution limits could also rapidly accelerate reductions in particle pollution from brakes. A brake particle limit of 3mg/km in 2025 instead of 7 mg/km in 2025 and 3 mg/km in 2035 would almost double the reduction in brake particle pollution from 19% to 34% already in 2030.
Source: Transport and Environment