Eurogas welcomes the Commission’s proposal to review the Weights and Dimensions Directive (WDD), which sets out the maximum weights and dimensions for heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs) to circulate on EU roads. This Directive aims at improving the environmental performance of such vehicles while ensuring fair competition among road transport operators. Commercial vehicles fuelled with biomethane (bio-LNG/bio-CNG) or hydrogen play a key role in the decarbonisation of road transport, alongside battery-electric vehicles.
We firmly believe that the upcoming Directive should ensure a level playing field between technologies with lower GHG footprints while considering the specific requirements of alternatively fuelled and zero-emission vehicles.
Eurogas recommends:
- The revision should maintain the existing definition of ‘alternative fuels’ encompassing fuels with GHG emission reduction potential in comparison to diesel and of ‘alternatively fuelled vehicles’ which require additional weights to accommodate their alternative powertrains.
- The revision should apply the additional weights derogations uniformly for alternatively fuelled and zero-emission vehicles, capping the weights derogation at the incremental weights of the relevant powertrains or enabling alternatively fuelled vehicles to carry additional payload as well as ZEVs.
- The revision must ensure that Member States can allow weight derogations for cross-border traffic in line with the expected evolution of the commercial vehicle fleet deriving from the CO2 standards for heavy-duty vehicles (Regulation (EU) 2019/1242).
Read our position paper here for more details: [PDF]
