Extension for the block exemption?

A report on the Automotive News web site (which I can't link to as it is subscriber-only) says that the Commission is planning to extend the block exemption.  No great surprise, as they have done it with previous iterations of teh exemption, and time was already getting short before the world caved in on itself last year.  The Commissioner has already hinted that this would be on the cards, too.

The intelligence comes from Christoph Konrad MEP, and the report tells us that a temporary extension is referred to as "the Konrad option".  I thought Malcolm Harbour had been pressing for it, too ...  Consultation with the European parliament will already push the new exemption back to about 2012, it is suggested, and the Commission is planning to present its proposal in July - which neatly takes it into the lifetime of the next Parliament, which will be elected in June.

The possible new regulation could be in the form of a general umbrella block exemption with sector specific guidelines, for the motor industry and presumably also for others.  The other possibility is for a "streamlined" version of the present block exemption, with dealer protection provisions excised and (at best, for dealers) placed in guidelines.  Again, nothing very new there: these seem to be the same possibilities that were being mooted in February, but I suppose that the more often they are repeated, the more credence we can give them.

Technical data, and Euro 5

Fleet News reports that the Commission has set up a new working party to deal with the requirement under Euro 5 for technical information on new cars to be made available to the independent repair sector. The headline says "Repairers to benefit from new EU rules": I have two problems with that - first that the EU does not make rules in this area, the EC does, and more importantly that repairers will actually end up with less than they already have.

Euro 5, being concerned with type approval, affects only new vehicles. The block exemption imposes requirements that apply to all vehicles. While (as I understand it) in some respects Euro 5 will be stronger, the fact that moving from the block exemption to the new rule will immediately take the existing car parc out of the requirement strikes me as a huge step backwards (or forwards, depending on your viewpoint, but I think most would say backwards). Perhaps Commission bureaucrats can afford to replace their Mercs or BMWs so frequently they don't appreciate the problem.