71. The Co-Chair from TFTA introduced GRPE-40-29-Rev.1, indicating that GRPE-90-40 was a copy of the working document that had been submitted to the February 2024 session of GRBP. She invited GRPE to provide comments to the TFTA leadership by the end of January.

72. The representative of the Netherlands asked about the ambient temperature effect in the drum method, which did not seem to be covered in the method as presented. The Co-Chair of TFTA agreed the methods would need to be improved. She added that a market assessment expected to take place shortly was expected to contribute to improving the draft methods.

73. The representative of OICA reckoned the latest draft text has improved significantly in the last iterations and was happy that some issues raised by the automotive industry were taken into account, such as the driving mode selection provisions. Given candidate tyres were expected to be assessed against reference tyre, he asked how the reference tyre would be assessed in the first place. He also enquired more information about the need for news series of amendment for this activity.

74. The Co-Chair of TFTA informed the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Union (EU) was expected to perform a large-scale study in 2024 to try and answer some of those questions.

75. The representative of Germany asked about the potential difficulty to correlate between the vehicle and drum methods. The Co-Chair confirmed this was work in progress and was expected to be tackled once the results of the market assessment were ready.

76. The Chair proposed to have a virtual informal GRPE session closer to the date of the GRBP session to get more in-depth insights to the proposal and to give GRPE more time to get familiar with the latest proposals from TFTA.

77. GRPE agreed to host a virtual informal session of GRPE on 29 January 2024 from 12.30 to 15.00 CET to provide further feedback to TFTA on the tyre abrasion proposals.