ESP compulsory on new cars and LCVs in EU member states

Starting November 1st 2011 the EU has made it mandatory for all new cars and light commercial vehicles to come equipped with an Electronic Stability Program (ESP). And by October 31st, 2013 all vehicles sold within the EU will have to come with ESP as standard. The EU is also looking at an increasing number of driver assistance systems such as cameras and radars to reduce the number of road accidents.

The European Commission’s strategy to improve road safety has declared that ESP has to be made mandatory on cars, trucks and buses alike to reduce the number of road fatalities of 1.3 million people every year on the roads across the world.  "ESP can prevent up to 80 percent of all skidding accidents. It is the most important vehicle safety system after the seat belt”, says Dr. Werner Struth, president of the Bosch Chassis Systems Control division. Bosch. 

ESP was invented by Bosch in 1995 and since then the system has been a global success. Bosch has delivered 50 million systems worldwide. In 2010 about 63% of all cars, trucks and buses sold in the EU were equipped with ESP and Bosch predicts that by the year 2013 every second car sold across the world will come equipped an ESP system. 

The global success of ESP supports the goal of the United Nations (UN) initiative “Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020,” which aims to help halve the number of road deaths by 2020.