This week The European Commission announced at the Motor Vehicle Working Group that it is delaying the proposal on Vehicle Safety Regulations until at least March 2018!

Meanwhile, vehicle technologies have been moving at an incredible pace over the past few years, with various levels of semi-autonomy being almost standard amongst high end vehicles now and the car industry breathlessly pursuing the concept of “driverless cars” and “autonomous driving”.

In this environment of high tech change the European commission has been preparing itself for updating and revising the General and Pedestrian Safety Regulations which defines the type approval safety specifications for all new vehicles.

Every new vehicle has to conform to a whole set of safety standards, and the Commission is due to update it with the latest technologies available. As you can imagine with the industry currently going bananas for automated vehicles, connected vehicles, and advanced vehicle systems we have a lot of interesting technologies to play with. Amongst other things considered are;

• Intelligent Speed Assistance – to restrict the vehicle to speed limits or at least make it difficult to go over the limit
• Autonomous Emergency Braking – the car will sense if it is will crash with a pedestrian, cyclist, vehicle and automatically stop
• Lorry cab design to be altered to allow for greater direct vision

You can read more about it here. Of course the devil will lie in the detail with regards to how these things perform and the lead-in times, but from our point of view it looks very positive, particularly ISA and AEB.

It is also coming at a time when road fatalities have been levelling off. In 2014 about 26,000 people of all modes were killed in road accidents throughout the EU. Bicycle fatalities make up 8.1% of the total number of road accident at 2,112 deaths and has fallen from 3,044 in 2005. This is excellent progress, however;

• This is a reduction of 30 % which though good has fallen at a much slower rate than fatalities in total at 42%
• There has been a levelling off of cycling fatalities recently, with 2,170 recorded in 2012 and even a slight increase from 2013 at 2,001

This is the European Commission’s huge opportunity to kickstart the reduction in fatalities in crashes around the EU. It is also a key time since there are technologies that can really focus on stopping crashes with those outside the vehicle and on speed reduction; these are genuine firsts and could be a real revolution in road safety for cyclists, and indeed for all road users.

It also looks positive to others, and in fact eight Member states (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Netherlands) wrote a letter to the Commission asking the Commission to get a move on and get this proposal out in 2017.

This is such a shame. There has to be another kick to continue the progress that we have seen in road safety initiatives and with the current crop of vehicle technologies this would make an ideal candidate. Instead, the Commission will now use the time to put another Cost/Benefit review of the possible tech to be used. This will be the third after this and that had reduced the options from 50 to 19.

We would urge the Commission to do everything in its power to get this file out and on track as quick as possible to get safer vehicles on the roads ASAP. Around 500 people are killed in the EU each week in road crashes, with such ground-breaking safety technologies tantalisingly on offer for all new vehicles and not just high end cars we have the possibility of seeing concepts like ‘Vision Zero’ as really achievable.