Traffic police calls to utilize outmoded vehicles

/By AzerNews/

By Mushvig Mehdiyev

Azerbaijan's Main Traffic Police Office considers to ban the use of obsolete vehicles in an effort to prevent an increase in number of the fatal road accidents attended by the vehicles with an expired exploitation period.

There are nearly 105,000 vehicles in Azerbaijan with an exploitation period of 30-35 years, according to Kamran Aliyev, Head of the Public Relations Department of the Main Traffic Police Office.

"Such vehicles cannot be named useless in terms of their technical specifications, but disrepair and weakness of the body against road collisions make the deadly accidents inevitable. So, removal of these vehicles from the traffic or their sufficient utilization would play a significant role in drop of the number of died and injured in traffic accidents," he said.

Aliyev noted that the issue on utilization of the obsolete vehicles is still open for discussions.

Experts say there are about 1.1 million vehicles in Azerbaijan, while nearly 600,000 of them do not meet the technical standards.

Azerbaijan has been applying the Euro-4 environmental standard since this April in an effort to decrease the import of outmoded cars from the foreign countries.

Ecology and Natural Resources Minister Huseyngulu Bagirov has earlier said Azerbaijan needed a development of a centralized program on the utilization of vehicles.

Meanwhile, a survey has earlier revealed the vehicle preferences of the drivers in Azerbaijan. Korean-made KIA, Japanese-made Toyota and German-made Mercedes-Benz emerged to be the loveliest car brands among Azerbaijani motorists.

The top 5 best-selling car brands in Azerbaijan's automative markets are Mercedes-Benz (price: min. $15,000 - max. $255,000), Toyota (price: min. $22,000 - max. $96,000), Hyundai (price: min. $16,000 - max. $63,000) Nissan (price: min. $18,000 - max. $96,000 and KIA (price: min. $16,000 - max. $44, 000).