The rules were meant to give certainty. To ensure Europe’s car industry hit the EU’s ambitious green goals, in 2021 lawmakers in Brussels set strict emission standards and an effective ban on new combustion engines by 2035. But since then, “quite a lot has happened,” says Benjamin Krieger, secretary-general of the European automotive parts industry body Clepa. “There’s conflict, there was a pandemic.
” Energy costs have shot up, demand for electric vehicles has dropped and cheaper Chinese cars are flooding the market. Europe’s automotive parts sector has suffered 30,000 net jobs losses in the year to November. The inflexible EU rules set up Europe’s car industry for failure, critics say. Since the regulations do not allow for plug-in hybrids or fuel-based range extenders that allow battery vehicles to go for longer, “many started to throw away the combustion engines business and put everything on e-mobility”, says Matthias Zink, chief executive of automotive technologies at car parts manufacturer Schaeffler. The car rules, which the industry and several EU governments are now pushing to loosen, are just one piece of a legislative outpouring from the previous European Commission’s mandate that ended with elections in June. The EU executive proposed hundreds of laws governing the green transition, the financial industry and the digital world. Now, conservative and far-right lawmakers across Europe accuse the bloc’s ambitious green and digital agendas of punishing citizens and businesses, as well as raising costs. “The complexity of the current regulatory framework and the excessive reporting obligations are one of the biggest barriers to innovation and growth within Europe,” the centre-right European People’s party, the EU’s biggest political group, wrote in a recent paper on the car industr