Euro 7 set to 'take nearly half of all tires off the road'

Cologne, Germany – Industry association Tyres Europe expects the upcoming Euro 7 regulation to have a major impact on tire markets across the EU, particularly as it is the first such legislation anywhere in the world to regulate and set standards for particulate emissions from tire abrasion.

“We now have an abrasion threshold set for passenger car tires that has been agreed at the United Nations in Geneva and those thresholds will be transposed into European legislation within the next six months,” secretary general Adam McCarthy said at The Tire Cologne expo, held 9-11 June, Cologne, Germany.

Regulators, the industry association leader explained, have adopted a two-stage approach: setting limits for stage one, and then, five years later, introducing reductions of the thresholds – with some specific allowances for certain tire types.

Stage one will have an additional wear-level allowance of 0.22g of tire wear per km per tonne of vehicle load. That will decline to 0.12 in five years past implementation. It will apply to all new tire types by 2028, and most existing tire types by 2030.

Measurement of tire wear will be via either a road-test method or laboratory/drum test method, both included in the UN agreement.

“It's important to note that we will see, in the first stage, a replacement rate of 28%, while in phase II, this goes up to 41%,” explained McCarthy. “So essentially, of the tires on the market today nearly 50% will have to be withdrawn from the market because of Euro 7.

For all new C2 (commercial van and light truck) tire types, Euro 7 will apply by 2030 and then in 2032, all existing tire types, while Tyres Europe has also started work on the C3 (truck & bus) tires, with an eye to the “particularly ambitious” regulatory timeframe.

The industry body is in talks with in the European Parliament with EU member states to try and extend that timeline by two years, not least “because the truck and bus segment is incredibly complicated with many different applications and many different tire types.”

A two-year extension here, he said, will make this much more feasible and capture the complexity in both the development of test methods for multiple different uses, all of which have different abrasion performances.

“This will also allow us to perform a data-gathering exercise, again, across the different applications so that we can then set those regulatory measures,” said McCarthy.