Lowering the road toll remains a key objective for developed nations including the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where regulators are presently undertaking many initiatives aimed at addressing the road safety issue. However, heavy vehicle operations remain largely unregulated. This has the potential to pose considerable road safety risks for a federation where the freight transport task is predominantly undertaken by this mode of transport. Australia’s innovative performance- based approach to addressing heavy vehicle safety is representative of worldwide best-practice in this field. The Australian method uses defined performance requirements in critical safety areas including high-speed dynamic behaviour and roll stability of vehicles, and assesses compliance with these requirements via computer simulation techniques. This method generally permits longer and heavier vehicle combinations to be operated than those allowed under traditional prescriptive regulations, which has the end result of increasing efficiency without detriment to safety. Using this method, ARRB Group Ltd has recently completed a project which assessed the performance of representative vehicles from Europe, North America, South Africa and Australia. This paper discusses the applicability of a similar approach for the UAE to assess typical transport vehicles, and guide future policy on weight, dimension limits and access arrangements.