Following on proposals by the International Automotive Lighting and Light-signaling Expert Group, known as GTB, the European Commission has put forward a plan for the overhaul of global lighting regulations.
Over the years, the UN Regulations on lighting equipment have mainly evolved along product lines, resulting in repetitive and overlapping requirements.
Since, for example, direction indicators, stop lamps, fog lamps, reversing lights, and parking lamps (just to name a few) all share common underlying technologies, a change can end up provoking a long list of essentially identical regulatory amendments.
At the same time, a host of new lighting technologies have emerged and are being applied to these lighting functions. The inclusion of design-related specifications in most lighting regulations means that technology shifts wreak havoc as regulations must be updated.
The dissonance between the regulatory structure and the evolution of lighting equipment results in frequent revisions, difficulty in keeping current, avoidable excess in transposing UN Regulations into local law, and general confusion in the marketplace.
However, transforming the current corpus of 41 regulations into a more rational, efficient system is no small undertaking.
Consequently, the Commission is proposing a five-year, three-phase project.
Initially, the plan would impose greater discipline on lighting amendments by limiting the number of versions of a rule that can run in parallel, forcing consolidation of amendments with a single transition date, and prohibiting tinkering via a running stream of minor corrections.
In the mid-term, the Commission would like to see the 41 regulations reduced to a half-dozen major groupings such as forward lighting, light signaling, rear lighting, etc.
Ultimately, the plan envisions narrowing lighting to three performance categories: lighting devices; light signaling; and integrated vehicle systems (which would encompass intelligent transport systems such as vehicle-to-vehicle communication and vehicle-to-infrastructure interaction).
The European Commission hopes this simplification and performance-based overhaul will accelerate the commercialization of new technologies by removing unnecessary technical barriers and regulatory bottlenecks.
Return to previous page