EUCAR shall meet the mission by:
- Driving strategy and assessment of collaborative automotive research & innovation;
- Giving guidance and perspectives to help society achieve safer, cleaner, smarter and more efficient transport solutions;
- Facilitating creation of high quality projects with industrial relevant results;
- Establishing common work with the European Commission, Member States and other key stakeholders;
- Collaboration with other Associations and Technology Platforms to establish and communicate common positions (strategic long term collaboration and short term, enabling prompt reactions).
Role of EUCAR
The members of EUCAR are, of course strong competitors, between themselves and other automotive manufacturers. However, in many fields where there are common interests and non-competitive advantages, like more basic research, the manufacturers often collaborate so as to:
- Combine forces in a targeted way to devise strategies and solutions for future challenges,
- Develop and agree common frameworks that can serve as a basis for future standards (e.g. standards for new fuels),
- Gather the critical mass and necessary momentum for faster implementation of R&D results.
European trans-national collaborative R&D efforts are amongst others carried out under the auspices of the European Council for Automotive Research and Development (EUCAR), focusing on pre-competitive issues of mutual interest. The automotive manufacturers founded EUCAR in 1994 as a platform and body to enable and support collaborative R&D in Europe.
EUCAR identifies future challenges and automotive R&D needs, communicates and interacts with European key stakeholders and initiates, monitors and supports R&D projects. The outcome affects innovations that are introduced to markets in the next 10 to 20 years.
EUCAR involves other stakeholders, such as suppliers, academia and research providers, vehicle users, customers, transport providers, authorities, where necessary, in order to agree on common visions and goals, identify challenges and develop feasible road maps and approaches to reach the goals.
