The European Association for Battery, Hybrid and Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (AVERE ) has launched a new department, the Light Electric Vehicle Task Force (LEV-TF), to “defend and promote the interests of all companies and organisations that are working in the field of electric L-category vehicles”.
Founded in 1978, the objective of AVERE is to promote “greener mobility”, originally with the focus on electric cars, but which will now broaden to promote electric bikes.
AVERE also wants to fill the gap caused by the disappearance of ETRA earlier this year – and the new LEV-TF will be managed by Annick Roetynck, former Secretary General of ETRA.
L-category vehicles includes many different types of electric vehicles, ranging from electric bicycles, mopeds and motorcycles, to electric tricycles, quads and quadricycles.
AVERE, comprising 1000 individual members in its ‘task force’, spans a network covering national associations, public bodies, research & development entities, vehicle and equipment manufacturers, electricity utilities as well as users throughout Europe.
The association says it will “defend and promote the LEV-sector in all other relevant dossiers, such as CEN-standardisation, battery regulations, recycling legislation, but also in more general dossiers such as EU transport policy, environmental policy or fiscal policy.” Added to that, AVERE plans to link members to funding opportunities through European subsidy programmes.
AVERE goes on to add: “The companies and organisations that sign up for the task force will set the advocacy priorities” with participation open to anybody with an interest in this market, subject to payment of a ‘contribution’. It will operate in conjunction with the USA-based Light Electric Vehicle Association (LEVA).
Asked how the new task force will further promote the cause of electric bikes, amongst the other vehicles the organisation covers, Annick Roetynck told Pedelecs:
“We will work directly with the European institutions (Commission and Parliament) for policies that promote and facilitate the use of electric bicycles. The White Paper on Transport prescribes that all petrol cars must be banned from cities by 2050. We believe a large number of those cars must be replaced by electric bicycles. Half of the car trips in the EU are 6 km or less. For these trips, people need to consider using bicycles or electric bicycles instead of cars.
However Roetynck believes the electric bike market is held back by type-approval constraints, saying: “Electric bicycles in the European Union are still severely restricted by ill-adapted technical regulations, such as, for instance, the type-approval for any bicycle of more than 25 km and 250W. This type-approval has been designed for classical motorcycles not for bicycles and therefore makes the legally required type-approval very difficult and expensive. Today, only pedal assisted bicycles with assistance up to 25 km/h and a maximum power of 250W may be classified as bicycles (and are subject to a European standard which may be applied through self-certification).”
AVERE LEV-TF says they will be dealing directly with the European Commission and Parliament to improve this: “We have worked incredibly hard to convince the Commission of a type-approval adapted to electric bicycles. We have made some progress but not as much as we wanted, so there is still an awful lot of work to do.”
Further explaining ETRA’s role in the European history of type-approval and electric bikes, Roetynck told Pedelecs: “In 1999, the European institutions put a wet finger in the air and decided that pedal assisted bicycles with assistance up to 25 km/h and maximum 250W motor output were excluded from the type-approval for mopeds and motorcycles. As a result, any other types of electric cycles were in the type-approval. In 2009, the European institutions started a complete review of that type-approval. With ETRA, we believed that this was a golden opportunity to obtain much better technical regulations for electric bicycles. Because only 25km/h-250W were excluded and could be categorised as bicycles, no other type of electric cycle made a chance of getting on the market. The reason being that they had to meet regulations that were very difficult and expensive to meet. Also, in 1999, the European institutions had set the specifications of 25 km/h – 250W in a totally random way. No research whatsoever had been carried out.
“In 2009, ETRA originally managed to convince the European Parliament to exclude all electric bicycles up to 25 km/h, irrespective of their motor output. We believed that it was counterproductive to limit it to 250W because some types of bicycles (for instance to carry goods) required more power and higher power did not result in higher speed, so … why not categorise all these vehicles as bicycles. We knew that it was useless to fight for exclusion from type-approval of any faster vehicles. Consequently, we presented a type-approval that was as much as possible adapted to the technical specificities of electric bicycles instead of mopeds and motorcycles.”
Later on, in 2012, ETRA campaigned against a review of electric bike type approval in the European Parliament which would have allowed off road use vehicles (“designed to travel on unpaved surfaces”) to circumvent type approval, which the organisation said would have resulted in “serious safety risks”.
On the UK market specifically, Roetynck says the plan is to develop contacts at BEBA and other companies operating in the market over the coming weeks and months, explaining: “We currently do not have any direct partnerships with UK companies or organisations. That is a pity, since the work we can do at European level with Commission and Parliament, needs to be strengthened at Council level through the member states. In that framework, we need local organisations/companies to advocate the European issues at national level.”
