No big trucks for little roads: American OEMs say EU is blocking imports

As the European Union and the US try to negotiate a satisfactory resolution to the trade war President Trump started last year, a new complication has emerged. It seems the American auto industry is not happy about pending changes to EU vehicle regulations that could make it impossible for Detroit to export its full-size pickups across the Atlantic. Restricting the flow of F-150s to the continent “could breach the spirit of the trade deal,” according to US negotiators, the Financial Times reported this morning.

No, I won’t take your word for it

Bringing a new vehicle to market is a rather different process in the EU than in the US. Here, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration practices something called self-certification. Essentially, an OEM tells NHTSA that its new car or truck complies with all the relevant federal motor vehicle safety statutes, then NHTSA takes that company at its word and the car goes on sale. Should that vehicle later turn out to have a defect, NHTSA can order a recall to remedy it. But there’s no pre-approval process by the government before sales can begin.

As you might imagine, self-certification is great for companies but less great for consumer safety.

The EU (and China) have a different system: type approval. Before being allowed to market a new vehicle in Europe, an automaker has to satisfy regulators in at least one EU country that its new vehicle does, in fact, conform to the relevant regulations. This is either done directly by a national type-approval authority or subcontracted out to specialist engineering firms. Either way, it means there are independent checks to ensure that the new model doesn’t pollute too much, that the safety and advanced driver assistance systems are validated for local use, and so on. And with the shift to software-defined vehicles and regular over-the-air updates, this will become an ongoing process rather than a one-off.

At least, that’s how it works for a mainstream model. For much lower volumes—typically 1,000 or less—there’s Individual Vehicle Approval. These have more relaxed standards than type-approval, although in 2012, the EU harmonized IVA requirements across member nations, and in 2024, it began another review to tighten safety standards.

This review is scheduled to be complete next year and has the potential to freeze out full-size pickups designed with no consideration for things like European pedestrian safety. But part of the trade deal includes the EU recognizing US car standards, and US ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told the FT that “you can’t have low tariffs and massive non-tariff trade barriers and claim you’ve got a functioning relationship.”

Whatever the opposite of coals to Newcastle is

Of all the fights to pick to bring down an enormous trade deal, the fate of a few full-size pickup trucks seems pretty trivial. In the US, the width of our streets is mandated by fire departments. That’s why the average US residential road is 50-feet wide (15.2 m) and why US road lanes are typically 12 feet (3.6 m) wide compared to between 8.2-10.6 feet (2.5 m-3.2 m) for European roads. Parking spaces have similarly smaller footprints.

But are they popular? According to Transport and Environment, a UK-based advocacy group, almost 5,000 Ram pickups (which they erroneously call Dodge RAMs) were imported into the EU in 2023. T&E pointed out that this was a 20 percent increase over 2022 imports to the region, but it’s also helpful to know that total vehicle sales in the EU in 2023 topped 10.5 million units. T&E said that total pickup sales in 2023 were 7,000.