Car manufacturers have won a four-year delay to the introduction of European rules designed to force them to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from new cars.

Jaguar Land Rover was granted a special deal after Britain joined ranks with other car-producing EU states to water down fuel efficiency targets proposed last year.

The highest levels of fines for failing to comply with the targets will not come into force until 2019, not in 2015 as previously proposed.

The deal means manufacturers will be able to delay investing in expensive carbon-reduction technology for several more years.

MEPs and the 27 EU member states have agreed to abandon plans to force the industry to reduce average CO emissions from around 158g/km last year to 130g/km by 2012.

Instead, the 130g/km target will be phased in over three years from 2012. A third of each company’s output will be exempted from the target in 2012.

Under the special deal for smaller manufacturers, Jaguar Land Rover will be able to choose to comply with a much less onerous target of a 25 per cent reduction by 2015 from its 2007 CO2 average.

Without the deal, the Indian-owned maker of high-emission executive cars and 4X4s would have had to reduce emissions by 38 per cent.

Jaguar-Land Rover last week responded to a sharp fall in sales by laying off 850 agency workers at plants in Castle Bromwich, Solihull, Whitley, and Gaydon, all in the West Midlands.

Britain had pressed for a special deal for Jaguar Land Rover because it argued that the rules favoured much larger companies which owned a range of marques of varying sizes and had more flexibility in how they met the target.

Other British manufacturers which produce fewer than 10,000 cars a year, including Aston Martin, Lotus and McLaren, have also won the right to have special targets which will be easier for them to achieve than the industry-wide one.

LTI, which makes London’s black cabs, was granted exemption from the rules.