EN 1317: TIME FOR A CHANGE

Over the past 30 years, the automotive sector has undergone a substantial evolution in improving safety, and the passive safety testing criteria, verified according to the EuroNCAP protocol, although voluntary, are now the benchmark for manufacturers to exalt the safety of the passenger car to the market. This great development of the automotive sector has not been matched by an equally imagined evolution of the compartment that “surrounds” the vehicle: the road.

The Norms that regulate the criteria with which road equipment must be designed are now outdated and not in line with technological progress; suffice it to think of road restraint devices, which represent the main passive safety system outside the vehicle, whose reference Norm remains anchored to the criteria known at the time of the drafting of Community Standard EN 1317, dating back to the 1990s, and to the Ministerial Decree issued in 2004, which basically traces the previous Ministerial Decree of 1992.

Thus, these are Standards that have been operational for more than 30 years and have not been updated to be in line with the evolution undergone by the traffic present on European roads and with the performance and characteristics of the vehicles currently on the road.

This immobility turns out to be highly detrimental to traffic safety also in view of the total static nature of the entities delegated to draft and update the Standards.

In this scenario, the only chance to improve the antiquity of our Standards is through voluntary action by the industry players to fill the gaps by gaining a greater awareness of the critical issues to be addressed to facilitate a necessary technological development.

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