A row over bumpers, lights and other body parts for crashed cars is coming to a head in the EU Commission. Currently nine of the 25 members - including Ireland and Britain - allow third-party manufacturers to supply such parts for repairing damaged cars, subject to safety standards. Kieran Fagan reports.
EU internal market commissioner Frits Bolkestein wants to compel the others 16 states to follow our example and open up the €10billion-a-year market. They include huge markets such as France, Germany and Italy where if you need a new bumper for your Citroën, Fiat or Audi, you must pay top dollar to the original manufacturer. Or you shoot up the motorway to the Benelux countries and buy a cheaper but otherwise indistinguishable third-party product.
"It's a question of copyright," says Alfredo Filippone, spokesman for ACEC, the European car makers' lobby group. He says that manufacturers invest huge sums in the design of new vehicles and allowing third parties to rip off that investment is wrong. "It goes against what the EU has done in protecting intellectual copyright in other areas."
Filippone also says that safety may not be best served by fitting body parts from third-party suppliers.
However, Bolkestein's officials argue that the manufacturers recoup the investment in design by selling cars in the first place. They say that the restriction in large swathes of the internal market inhibits the growth of strong competition throughout the whole market, including Ireland and the other eight "liberalised" - in this respect anyway - countries.
Most car makers outsource a very large proportion of the finished vehicle, and often the third-party supplier is also the original supplier, providing replacement parts at a more favourable price to the customer.
The Dutch commissioner will seek backing from other EU commissioners at a meeting next Wednesday. He faces an uphill struggle, observers believe, against the might of the French and German motor lobby. Ireland's crash repair sector, which has long had a thriving trade in so-called "spurious" parts, will watch with interest.