Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-10-Speech-2-016"
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"en.20090310.5.2-016"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to start – and not for the sake of formalities but out of genuine feeling on my part – by offering my heartfelt thanks to Commissioner Verheugen, the Commission, its staff, the Czech Presidency, which is unfortunately unable to be with us today, and those on the committee for their positive and constructive cooperation on this dossier.
If you look into how environmentally-friendly measures for cars can be achieved, you are sometimes surprised that so much time is spent looking into other measures. I think that we, as Parliament, as a European body, have together taken an important step forwards that has not, so far, really managed to demonstrate its importance to the general public or in the political debate.
The regulation that we are passing today is environmentally friendly since, as part of the CO
package, it represents an important contribution, on the part of European policy, to the reduction in CO
emissions from motor vehicles. At the same time, however – and I would call this clever environmental policy – it also helps consumers – drivers – to pay less while, at the same time, acting in an environmentally-friendly manner, as it leads to considerable savings, not only in terms of CO
but also in terms of the consumption of petrol and diesel. In addition, it also – and this, too, is an important point that was particularly important to Parliament and its Members – leads to improvements in the safety of European roads, and not only in relation to goods vehicles, but in relation to cars as well.
I have no intention of going through the individual points of the regulation headline by headline, but I do think that there are a few important political signals that we should go into at this point.
The first point is that, by introducing a mandatory tyre pressure monitoring system for motor vehicles, we will be bringing about a situation whereby better tyre pressure, through an improved driving performance of tyres that the tyre industry is capable of realising, will see drivers in Europe consume up to 5% less fuel without seeing the costs rocket. A tyre pressure monitoring system that is already on the market costs around EUR 100, sometimes significantly less, and the resultant cost savings for consumers will be significantly above that.
The second point that I think merits special attention is the fact that we have succeeded in obtaining the mandatory fitting of a stability system – known as the ESP system – into vehicles as early as 2011 and that we did this not against the will of the European motor industry but with its express participation and support, as this will lead to a considerable improvement in safety on European roads. Unfortunately, due to the fact that the relevant technical specifications were not yet sufficiently ready, we did not manage to also secure the mandatory fitting of the emergency braking systems and the lane departure warning systems – I apologise for these somewhat technical terms, which do not generally come up in the public debate on this issue – by the year 2018 in goods vehicles, in particular. This measure will lead to a significant improvement in the safety of European roads, especially of our motorways. All I can say is that this could reduce the numbers of deaths and injuries by around 35 000.
Finally – and there are still a few differences of opinion on this issue – we have also brought about a situation through this regulation whereby tyres will produce considerably less noise. This does involve some costs, it is true, and for that reason, we thought it was particularly important to include text in the regulation stating that the reduction in noise emissions by road traffic cannot be solely down to tyre manufacturers and, indirectly, consumers, but that it is also a responsibility of the Member States in terms of the road surfaces they provide, and I am extremely grateful that the Council did, in the end, adopt this stipulation.
I thank you for your cooperation and I look forward to an interesting debate."@en1
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