VCA type-approved bodybuilders
Every body and conversion we build meets the UK Vehicle Certification Agency standard — independently tested, audited and signed off.
Four chassis manufacturers.
Lonsdale Commercials holds active VCA type approval for the following base vehicles — meaning any body we fit to one of these chassis ships road-legal, with no further homologation work needed.
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Citroen -
Peugeot -
Ford -
Vauxhall
What is automotive type approval?
Put simply, type approval is the confirmation that production samples of a design will meet specified performance standards. The specification of the product is recorded, and only that specification is approved. Automotive EC Directives and UN Regulations require third-party approval — testing, certification and production conformity assessment by an independent body.
Each Member State is required to appoint an Approval Authority to issue approvals, and a Technical Service to carry out the testing to the EC Directives and Regulations. An approval issued by one Authority is accepted in all Member States. A similar arrangement exists for UN regulations, where Contracting Parties have a similar role to EC Member States. In the UK, the Vehicle Certification Agency (VCA) is both the Approval Authority and the Technical Service.
Note: Automotive Directives are "old approach" in that they require third-party testing and approval. "New approach" Directives follow a different format and place more obligation on the manufacturer to ensure the product meets the requirements — EU Member States have agreed the new approach isn't appropriate for road vehicles.
Whole Vehicle Type Approval
EC approval of most road vehicles is built around the "Whole Vehicle" framework Directive 2007/46/EC (as amended), which specifies the range of aspects that must be approved against separate technical Directives. To gain EC whole vehicle approval, a vehicle first has to be approved for various systems — brakes, emissions, noise, and so on. The issue of the whole-vehicle approval doesn't itself involve testing, but a production sample of the complete vehicle is inspected to check that its specification matches the specifications contained in all the separate Directive approvals.