Car makers caught in a cat trap

Author:

ROBIN ROBERTS

There’s a lot of heat being generated in car makers’ boardrooms over future exhaust emissions.

Germany’s profitable premium carmakers and their cash-strapped French and Italian competitors have clashed over the regulations  from 2015.

The dispute centres on the complex but financially critical formula used by the European Commission to assign long-term CO2-cutting targets to individual manufacturers.

The EU’s current regulation set in 2008, calls on manufacturers to cut cars’ average CO2 grams per kilometer to 130 by 2015, a target most carmakers endorse and say they can meet.

At the time, after heated discussions, carmakers agreed on a “burden sharing” formula that takes into account the weight of cars. Companies that made bigger vehicles – led by the German brands BMW, Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen’s Audi – had to cut more of their fleet’s CO2.