Is the EU banning old car repairs?
- Martin Thrift-Auto
- Feb 18, 2024
- 6 min read
There’s been another round of chatter lately from people claiming that the European Commission is going to ban all repairs on cars that are over 15 years old. So I thought I’d look into how much truth there is in this and whether the EU really does want to stop us fixing our cars.
And the answer is, mostly no…but also a bit of yes. Here’s the story.
What’s actually been said?
Let’s start with some context. Some people are hollering that the Commission pushing is rampant wasteful consumerism and getting everyone to buy shiny new Teslas on finance, but actually it’s the opposite – this is all driven by the fact that there are too many scrap cars getting dumped illegally rather than properly recycled for a more sustainable supply chain, what it calls circular consumption.
In fact far from wanting to prevent keeping cars alive, this same Directorate has rightly been pushing pretty hard against car manufacturers for the right to repair. It’s been fighting the things we hate carmakers doing like coding wing mirrors to the ECU so you can only get them fixed by a main dealer, or shutting down aftermarket parts suppliers.
The rules about properly dismantling and recycling dead cars are nothing new. This directive has actually been in place since the year 2000 and doesn’t seem to have stopped anyone from keeping an old car alive if they want to for the last almost a quarter of a century.
So no, they aren’t coming to knock on your door and tell you that your 15 year old car has to be scrapped, or even that you can’t get the sills welded or the brakes done or the gearbox changed. But – well, there is a teeny tiny ‘but’ coming.
‘End of life’ cars
The new part is a tightening up on the existing regulations for ‘end of life vehicles’ to close the loopholes that the dodgier end of the car breaking industry has apparently been using to patch up wrecks and pass them off as viable used cars, or dump them in the woods with all their recyclables and pollutants.
It’s pretty easy to see what they have in mind as an end of life car: something three or four model cycles old that’s been crashed, burned or driven into a river, or whose engine has blown up, or that has had so many dodgy MOT patches ineptly welded on that it might as well be made of hair gel and postage stamps.
Here’s that skinny little ‘but’ though. There are some slightly odd items in the definition, and this I think is where the alarm bells start to at least tinkle a little. Having the doors removed, for example, is apparently terminal.
The most concerning part, though, is this concept of a car being end-of-life if it’s economically irreparable, which is defined as if the cost of the repairs needed to get it a roadworthiness certificate is more than its market value.
Ok, but even without this tightening of loopholes, if a car fails its MOT or equivalent then its market value plummets. I started thinking about this and then my brain got stuck in an infinite loop and kind of melted, because if the car is now forcibly defined as end of life because it needs a significant repair then surely its market value is just its weight as mixed metal scrap, right?
In which case a bill for two tyres or a cracked windscreen would render most cars beyond economic repair at their scrap value.
The paper does talk about how it isn’t mean to infringe on people’s property rights, which is encouraging. But it does still sound like any garage could in theory just arbitrarily tell you your car is dead and that they’re going to forcibly recycle it while you go home on the bus to drink yourself numb and start filling in leasing forms.
I don’t think that’s what they mean. But it is what they’ve said.
This definition certainly needs more work. And in any case, in the real world of breadline motoring – and believe me, I’ve been there – the question isn’t ‘does it cost more to repair than it’s worth?’ but ‘does it cost more than buying a different car that’s roadworthy?’
Historically interesting
The document explicitly states that none of this applies to vehicles of historic interest, which are both excluded from the current EU legislation and outside the scope of the new Regulation proposal.
So that’s good news for nostalgia fans – or is it?
This is how It defines vehicles of historic interest:
· over 30 years old
· that are out of production and
· have been preserved but not substantially altered in their main technical components
There’s really quite a lot to chew your way through in that sentence.
First of all, if cars are one garage bill away from the crusher at 15 years old then not very many of them are going to make it to 30. Those that do are much more likely to be millionaire’s playthings than the sort of my-day-had-one-of-those cars you see at the Festival of the Unexceptional or indeed on this channel.
And that danger zone between 15 and 30 years old currently includes all sorts of cars that are somewhere near the bottom of their value curve but which you can easily imagine being thought of as nailed-on classics in the future: the original Audi TT, the flat six engined Porsche Boxster and Cayman, the Ford Puma, Alfa Brera, original Honda Insight, supercharged Mini Cooper S, Mazda RX8…the list goes on and on.
Another EV conspiracy then?
The alt-right sovereign individual crowd have been rushing for their tin-foil hats and megaphones to stir up angst. So is this a new front in the push to move us all from combustion engines to electric cars?
Actually this hasn’t come from the electrification people at all. In fact it applies to EVs just as much as combustion engine cars, perhaps even more so given the lifespan and cost of battery packs.
Let’s go back to that definition of historically interesting for a moment. Vehicles that have not been substantially altered in their main technical components… so that would surely rule out any classic car that’s been converted to an electric powertrain, right?
At last, a Brexit benefit!
Here in the UK we can just laugh at this though, right? We took back control, remember, so presumably it won’t affect us plucky free Brits anyway.
Don’t be so sure, for two reasons. Firstly, successive UK governments have been coming up with similar solutions to the same sort of problem for many years. In fact it was Boris himself who introduced a ban on new ICE cars from 2030, five years earlier than the rest of Europe. Labour hasn’t shown any enthusiasm for bangernomics either – witness Gordon Brown’s original scrappage scheme in 2009.
Even if the UK doesn’t follow suit, whatever impact this has on the European market for older car replacement parts is likely to affect Britain too. Manufacturer parts support for cars that age is limited even now; the aftermarket for middle-aged European cars will struggle for economies of scale and even Asian manufacturers won’t leave their European supply chains untouched just to serve the UK.
Who should we believe?
It’s almost impossible to disprove a conspiracy theory by definition, just like your mum couldn’t prove that there weren’t really any monsters under the bed that vanished when you turned the light on.
This channel struggles to find new viewers, and others have recently proved that a fantastic way to build a fan base is to switch up from mediocre car videos to peddling tales about a secret world government that’s set its sights on ridding the world of fun and freedom one Citroen Picasso at a time. But I’m not going to do that.
And while I’ve set out why I think some of the wording of the Commission’s documents gets no more than a B- could do better, as the owner of several not very valuable old cars I do take some comfort from its pretty clear and unambiguous summing up:
These criteria are first targeting illegal operators who, for example, use stolen cars, or pile up old used cars, for the purposes of smuggling spare parts or used cars without proper identification. It is not to hinder legal activities by private owners or hobbyists of vintage cars. If a car needs a repair, any part may be changed as long as the vehicle is fit to pass the roadworthiness inspections and remains authorised to operate on the EU roads. In particular, the proposed Regulation does not prohibit the repair or replacement of the engine, gearbox, shell or chassis assembly of a vehicle.
So there you go. No need to panic. Probably.
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