Mr. Alan Nolan:

Táimid an-bhuíoch don choiste don seans labhairt anseo thar cionn SIMI. The Society of the Irish Motor Industry, SIMI, is the national representative organisation for the motor industry in Ireland. The organisation has more than 1,100 members, covering all sectors of the motor industry including vehicle and parts importing, sales, repairs and servicing as well as other specialist support businesses from finance to IT providers.

The recovery over recent years has seen employment in the sector increase by almost 10,000 jobs to a current level of 45,000. The improvement in business this year will see the VRT and VAT collected for the Exchequer from car sales exceed €1 billion for the first time since before the recession. On the issue at the centre of today’s invitation, we are acutely aware of the seriousness of the situation for our sector. However, we cannot answer on behalf of the individual member concerned or comment on specific issues in so much as they relate only to a specific individual member company. It is clearly more appropriate that any such questions are addressed to our colleagues from Volkswagen Group Ireland, VWGI. We are happy to deal with the more general issues and principles from an industry viewpoint. In this regard there is no evidence that there is a similar NOx issue in relation to any other companies.

We do not manufacture any vehicles in Ireland so we are not directly involved in the type approval of new vehicles at the manufacturing stage or in emissions testing under the EU directive. These are, however, key issues for us in Ireland as we have such a strong environmental focus as a country. The motor industry in Ireland has been very strongly supportive of the environmental agenda and we are aware that the future for private car transport needs to be as sustainable as possible. In Europe, the focus in relation to emissions has been principally on CO2 as fears over climate change and Kyoto targets focused on the need to reduce CO2 from road transport. Our vehicle registration tax, VRT, and road tax rates are also based on the CO2 emissions figures rather than the NOx emissions which are at issue here.

The issues raised here and the focus on how CO2 and NOx emissions are tested in Europe have strongly centred the debate on the difference between the type approval laboratory tests and actual results in real world driving as experienced by consumers. The EU and the motor industry at European level have been working for some years to change over to real driving emissions, RDE, testing and the current debate will speed up delivery of that project as it is now a matter of urgency. This is targeted to begin in September 2017 and these RDE tests will produce figures that will be far closer to what consumers experience when they drive on the roads. This is a phased project which will implement further stronger emissions targets over a number of years after that. It is likely that the final detail on these new requirements will be confirmed by the EU before the end of the year. Consumers will see huge improvements in the real world accuracy of emissions and fuel consumption data over the next couple of years.