The United States abstains due to the inability to quantify the benefits in terms of lives saved as required by US statutes caused by a current lack of resources to devote to the effort. All other Contracting Parties present vote in favor. The EU expresses its disappointment and stresses its belief that the effectiveness of the 1998 Agreement requires urgent attention.

105. Submitted for consideration and vote, the proposed draft UN GTR on tyres (ECE/TRANS/WP.29/2013/63, ECE/TRANS/WP.29/2014/83, WP.29-164-04) was established in the UN Global Registry on 13 November 2014 by consensus vote of the following Contracting Parties present and voting: Australia, Canada, China, European Union (voting for Cyprus, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom), India, Japan, Norway, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, South Africa and Turkey.

106. The technical report (ECE/TRANS/WP.29/2013/122, WP.29-164-04) and the adopted proposal for the development of the UN GTR (ECE/TRANS/WP.29/AC.3/15) would be appended to the established UN GTR.

107. The United States of America voted to abstain on the UN GTR on tyres. The representative of the United States of America thanked France as sponsor, the United Kingdom for the chairmanship, and the tyre industry for the time and energy involved in the effort. He stated that the UN GTR offers a set of safety requirements that, in its entirety, no single country or region currently has and that, when implemented would truly increase vehicle safety worldwide. He further indicated that the United States of America abstained as it is not in a position to implement the UN GTR within a year due to resource constraints (according to the rules of the 1998 Agreement).

108. The representative of EU expressed his gratitude to the parties for their hard work to finalize the draft GTR on tyres and welcomed the positive vote by the Contracting Parties. He regretted that there had been one abstention and pointed out that the need for efficiency of the 1998 Agreement was more than urgent. The representative of ETRTO echoed a similar statement.