Are you more of an end-of-the-month or end-of-the-world type? A petrol car or an electric vehicle? Unless, as a middle ground, you have opted for a hybrid engine? Wrong, from 2035, new cars with a combustion engine will be banned from sale in Europe, as will hybrid vehicles. This was decided by the European Parliament in 2022. This forced march towards zero emissions is part of the European Green Deal: the climate emergency is well worth stopping combustion engines.
However, the trajectory raises questions. Of course, a calendar without a deadline is like a car without an engine: it is useless. This is why the MEPs, pushed by a powerful green lobby, imposed this date of 2035. To get there, journey times were set. This great technocratic mess earned Europe applause from around the world, with the Old Continent winning the prize for regreening. So much the better, we will no longer be able to accuse Europeans of looking the other way when the house is burning.
Alas, today it is the car companies that are burning, and our good Eurocrats are looking the other way. Yet the reality is before their eyes: the famous journey times are too short to allow car manufacturers to adapt, especially since Covid, the war in Ukraine, the upheaval of supply chains and inflation have all been there..
First fines from 2025?
There is therefore an urgent need to review the calendar, unless we want to die cured. Because the injunction of the clean vehicle at all costs is very likely to turn into a hearse for several European manufacturers. From Madrid to Berlin, from Paris to Athens, electric cars are not yet crisscrossing the roads in sufficient numbers to take over from thermal vehicles. The ticking of Brussels, however, continues, with the first fines that could fall as early as 2025 for manufacturers who pollute too much. We are talking about fifteen billion euros, enough to knock out car manufacturers, already under pressure from Chinese competitors.
And that’s not all. “As long as the production gaps between Chinese and European electric vehicles remain so wide, the 2035 obligation will lead to an unacceptable drain on purchasing power for the population. We are preparing for a vast social anger of the yellow vest type on the scale of the entire eurozone,” warns Christian Gollier, climate specialist and general director of the Toulouse School of Economics.
In the European Parliament, where the Greens took a beating in the June elections, we should reflect on the Draghi report, which recalls that the automobile industry represents 14 million European jobs. It states that the famous “European Green Deal” is based on the creation of new green jobs, so that “its political viability could be threatened if decarbonisation leads to deindustrialisation in Europe – including industries that can support the green transition”. One more moment, Mr. Green Executioner?