The EP Committee on Transport and Tourism today adopted the report by Hungarian Socialist MEP, Zita GURMAI on "The First Intelligent Car", a European Commission initiative to towards Europe-wide Safer, Cleaner and Efficient Mobility, reports the socialist group in EP.

The main objectives proposed by Mrs Gurmai were adopted almost unanimously. Her approach was more from an information society point of view rather than a transport one. "European mobility of citizens must find a healthy balance to mobilise its citizens." said Zita Gurmai.

For the Socialist report author, "our most important task and responsibility is saving lives." She also fully supports the aim of a full-scale roll-out of eCall [1] by 2010 and encourages the member states who have not yet signed the eCall Memorandum of Understanding to do so, preferably before mid 2008. This system could save 2500 lives every year in Europe.

Equally, the adopted report fully supports the goal of achieving 100 per cent availability of Electronic Stability Control for the model year 2012. If all cars had an ESC, 4000 lives could be saved each year.

In environmental terms the report wants to promote the use of Adaptive Cruise Control, which adapts the speed of the car to surrounding traffic, and could lead to an overal fuel reduction of three per cent.

Gurmai says; "I think that we achieved a brave but realistic result with this report; we have to take it step by step. Taking into account that for consumers price is important, we have invested time in research to obtain the best product, so now we must invest time encouraging people to buy them.

Even if saving lives is the main aim of the Intelligent Car initiative, "Intelligent cars need intelligent drivers and training of car dealers to be able to sell the product."

The White Paper on Transport policy set a target of a 50 per cent reduction in European road accident fatalities by 2010 in comparison to 2001. As there are currently a deeply regrettable 41,600 deaths a year on European roads, we must still reduce this total by four thousand in order to meet the Union's initial goal.