"Environmental impact" is very broad - you can argue it to cover almost anything.

I think this the main problem: do you trust a bureaucracy(is. non-technical people working in good faith to make rules for the society) to understand the implications of products or do you trust the manufacturer to do the same. In my opinion the bureaucrat can have good intentions, but lacks technical knowledge, while the manufacturer has the technical knowledge, but has incentives to disregard safety.

In my opinion the manufacturer and the bureaucrat are the same thing. The bureaucrat’s chief priority is to get re-elected, not to make the environment better or cars safer. The manufacturers priority is to make a profit. Sometimes their goals align with the interests of the public but a lot of the time they don’t.

Both have incentives to undermine or promote public safety and both have different avenues of accountability.

But big corporate is a bureaucracy, upper-management people making decisions are not engineers and it's driven by political competition between different bosses jokeying for positions

Is there actually any difference?

I'd argue that environmental impact is a health issue.