Dacia<\/a> more than ever, and it’s more difficult than ever to be Dacia,\u201d Adt remarked.<\/p>\n“The European market has lost three million cars since 2019. It has\u00a0never come back to pre-Covid levels,” she said, equating the decline to losing the entire German market, Europe’s biggest.<\/p>\n
“And if you say it’s three million cars, then do the math: it’s 10 factories, 12 million tyres, maybe 15 million seats, nine million wipers…”<\/p>\n
“This is a little bit scary when you think about economics in Europe, and if you analyse why this happened \u2013 because it didn’t happen in any other region of the world \u2013 it is because cars are getting too expensive. And if you’re digging down on why our cars are getting so expensive, the main reason is the regulation.\u00a0This still remains an issue.”<\/p>\n
Manufacturers must adhere to an increasing amount of emissions and safety regulations in Europe, and\u00a025% of Dacia’s R&D budget and engineering workforce is currently dedicated to meeting the various rules.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We have fulfilled around 100 regulations so far, and we still have another 107 regulations to fulfil by the end of the decade,” Adt\u00a0said.<\/p>\n
“The question is:\u00a0‘Is that exactly what the customer needs and wants?’\u00a0The most used button in our cars is the so-called magic button,\u00a0where you can turn off all the [ADAS] beeps.<\/p>\n
“So we have asked the [European] Commission,\u00a0together with other manufacturers,\u00a0to have at least a regulation freeze on small cars to get a chance to offer affordable mobility.”<\/p>\n
Fabrice Cambolive, CEO of Dacia parent brand Renault, recently said its engineers were “dealing with a tsunami of regulations from Europe”\u00a0and called for a regulation freeze\u00a0for 10 years.<\/p>\n
“Then we can focus on affordability, we can focus on electrification,” he said. “This for sure will help the European market to reboot.”<\/p>\n
Adt previously suggested that looser regulation\u00a0on small cars could be key to Dacia putting the Hipster microcar<\/a> into production,\u00a0but when asked for an update on that programme, she would only tell Autocar to “stay tuned”.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dacia CEO Katrin Adt has called on European law makers to relax regulation on small cars to reduce…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625448,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,61,60],"class_list":["post-625447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625447\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}