The first and second AutoOil programmes were conducted since 1992 as a partnership between the European Commission and the automobile and oil industries. These have introduced emission reductions in Europe based on numerical modelling for a target year. They aimed to identify the most cost-effective way to meet desired future air quality over the whole European Union. In their time, these regulatory efforts were considered an important step towards a new approach for establishing European emission limits. With this work, we review the effectiveness of forecasts carried out with numerical modelling and compare these with the actual measurements at the target year, which was the year 2010. Based on these comparisons and new technological innovations these methodologies can incorporate new sectorial assessments for improving the accuracy of the modelling forecasts and for examining the representativeness of emissions reductions, as well as for the simultaneous assessment of population exposure to cocktails of toxic substances under realistic climatological conditions. We also examined at the ten AutoOil domains the geographical generalisation of the forecasts for CO and NO₂ at 1065 European urban areas on the basis of their population and the local population density.