Asian carmakers under pressure to follow EU lead

Date: 21/01/1999

By Peter Chapman

EU-BASED car firms won many plaudits when they agreed a ground- breaking deal to cut carbon dioxide emissions by one quarter over the next decade.

Under the agreement brokered by members of the Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA), carmakers have pledged to achieve an average target of 140 grammes of CO2 emissions per kilometre - equivalent to a 25&percent; drop on 1995 levels - by 2008.

But company bosses and engineers now face the enormous challenge of delivering on a promise which is technically beyond them today.

Ford Europe president Jim Donaldson acknowledges this will be far from easy. “It is unusual to undertake to do something which we do not know how to do at the time of making the agreement,” he admits.

But he insists that the challenge can be met, adding: “When Kennedy said in the 1960s that we should put a man on the moon, there wasn't someone there with a rocket ready.”

The industry claims that the fact that car manufacturers agreed to the deal at all demonstrates that they are genuinely keen to address environmental concerns they have shirked in the past.

“Fifteen years ago, unless we had demonstrated something in the laboratory, we did not want to talk about it. We were seen as being against progress. Now we say we agree with the thrust of the targets and we should work to achieve them,” says Donaldson.

Japanese and Korean carmakers are now under pressure to make similar promises to cut emissions from cars sold in the Union. Commission officials presented their demands to the Koreans at a meeting in Seoul this week and have given Japanese carmakers until the middle of next month to come up with a model agreement on emissions restrictions.

Transport Commissioner Neil Kinnock would like both to match the pledge given by EU carmakers. But industry representatives argue that it would be difficult to meet similar targets, especially for Korea, which lags far behind Europe in developing fuel-efficient technology.

Despite reaching high volumes of output since the 1980s, it borrowed much of the technology in its vehicles from Japanese companies.

Darcy Nicolle, a spokesman for the Japanese car lobby group JAMA, described the target as “very ambitious” even for high-tech Japanese manufacturers. He said firms were trying to find ways to meet it, but added that it was “hard to see how we can make the big jump in fuel efficiency”.

Commission environment officials reject this argument, insisting an agreement is essential, and that time is running out.

The stakes are high for the Japanese and Koreans. Failure to reach a deal would, according to ACEA secretary-general Camille Blum, be “a marketing disaster” for Japanese and Korean carmakers, which have “rightly or wrongly” built up a reputation among consumers for producing more fuel-efficient vehicles than their European counterparts.