The EU ban on combustion car engines is in trouble

DOUAI, France — The EU’s vision of ending sales of greenhouse-gas-spewing cars by 2035 is under fire.

The idea was a key priority of the previous European Commission, which was dedicated to the fight against climate change. But war, a populist backlash, economic stagnation and a car industry hemorrhaging red ink are forcing Brussels to backtrack.

Europe’s automakers scored a massive political win this week when Commission President Ursula von der Leyen gave in to their pleas for leniency on emission targets that went into force this year and for an earlier review of the 2035 legislation as part of her plan to rescue the troubled car industry.

Buoyed by that success, automakers and their political backers want more.

“Give the car industry an inch and they’ll take a mile. Before the ink was dry on the automotive plan, there were calls for technology openness,” said Julia Poliscanova, senior director for vehicles at green NGO Transport & Environment. “The Green Deal will suffer a death by a thousand cuts unless lawmakers stand up for it.”

While the original measure was approved in 2023 by all member countries (despite last-minute resistance from Germany), it’s turned into a political punching bag.

Over the last year, elections across the EU saw national governments, lobbyists and automakers pick up the call to weaken or reverse it.

The European People’s Party — part of von der Leyen’s political family and the largest grouping in the European Parliament — promised to reverse the law.

In Germany, angst over the auto sector’s decline helped fuel the winning campaign of Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz, whose party also has its sights set on undoing the legislation.

Germany is keen for an exception for e-fuels — a synthetic alternative to gasoline, but one that is much more expensive than fossil fuels and not made in large quantities.

Italy wants the law changed to make an exception for biofuels, despite worries about deforestation, biodiversity loss and soil erosion from using the fuel. Poland also backs that idea.

Popping Champagne

French policymakers — including Commission Vice President Stéphane Séjourné — went on a victory lap to a Renault factory on Wednesday.

They were celebrating the Commission announcement that it would water down this year’s emissions targets after carmakers complained they could pay billions in fines for missing the target. Now, instead of the target being based on this year’s sales, it’ll be based on a three-year average, which makes it easier to hit for companies that have done less to clean up their fleets.

“I have probably been the first one to raise the hand on this,” Renault CEO Luca De Meo told POLITICO at the Renault factory at Douai in northern France. As former president of EU car lobby ACEA, De Meo beat the drum for leniency on emission targets.

De Meo also welcomed the Commission’s support for technological neutrality — meaning that not only battery-powered cars can meet green targets — although he insisted he doesn’t want to scrap the 2035 measure.

“It opens a window on a logic that we have always supported. Tell us where you want us to go, but don’t tell us how,” he said, noting that “the enemy is not a technology rather than another — the enemy is CO2.”

Yet, not every automaker was in a celebratory mood. Swedish brand Volvo, which was bought by Chinese firm Geely in 2010, wanted the targets to remain the same.

“Those that have done their homework, should not be disadvantaged by last-minute changes to existing legislation, not least during the year in which they come into effect,” the company said in a statement.

Paris still defends the combustion engine ban but insists that softening this year’s emission targets will help carmakers to meet the 2035 deadline. 

“It was paradoxical to ask manufacturers to pay fines and at the same time to support them,” Séjourné said in Douai.

Piling on

The Commission also agreed to move up a review of the 2035 law from 2026 to this year — another key demand from carmakers that makes it easier to undermine the overall legislation.

Opponents smell blood in the water.

“We have forced the Commission to remove the fines trap and to anticipate the review of the CO2 regulation. Now we must immediately make a common front to overcome the madness of the Green Deal,” Italy’s Industry Minister Adolfo Urso said in a written statement.

Czech MEP Filip Turek with the far-right Patriots for Europe grouping, said that Commission’s automotive plan marks the beginning of the end for the 2035 ban.

Germany’s newly elected Christian Democrats called the Commission’s announcement “half-hearted and unsatisfactory.”

“I am convinced that the greatest threat to the European automotive market is no longer competitors from China, but the flood of European regulation,” said Thomas Bareiß, grouping’s transport spokesperson in the German Bundestag. “The emission targets could have been cancelled completely; so far nobody has been able to explain to me conclusively why we need emission targets at all for successful climate protection.”

Maintaining the ban, he said, is creating uncertainty in the market and delaying the uptake of alternative fuels. 

Bareiß and other opponents of the 2035 legislation are latching on to technological neutrality to further weaken the law, which some automakers and political groups say should allow hybrids and other types of vehicles that combine combustion engines and batteries.

Hildegard Müller, president of German car lobby VDA, said more needs to be done to “implement technological openness. This also includes giving greater consideration to the role of plug-in hybrids beyond 2035.”

Climate groups say that hybrids still emit CO2, violating the 2035 law.

The law’s defenders are fighting a rear-guard battle to keep the legislation from being so watered down that it becomes useless.

“The EU Commission is opening Pandora’s box, because the EPP wants to do more than just turn a few screws, it wants to completely overturn the combustion engine ban,” said Green MEP Michael Bloss.

Socialist MEP François Kalfon approved the EU auto rescue package but fears the Commission’s review might turn into an effort to kill the 2035 ban.

“It has to be a review clause, not a dropout clause, and that’s the risk,” he told POLITICO on a train back from the Renault factory.

Gabriel Gavin and Nicolas Camut contributed to this report.