Taxation is the car's main enemy

Unrae (foreign car representatives in Italia) released data on company car registrations in the main European markets in 2025. In Germany, the share of these cars was 64.4 per cent of total registrations. In the UK the corresponding figure was 61.4 % and in France 54.3 %, but in Italia the figure dropped to 45.8 %. Italy's delay in coming into line with European standards in terms of company car ownership has been going on for a long time and is essentially due to cost deductibility and VAT deductibility, which are generally integral in Europe, while in Italia there are severe limitations.

This situation places Italian companies in a position of inferiority compared to their European competitors and depends on a strongly penalising orientation towards the company car, which has ancient origins that concern the car in general, still seen by the tax authorities as a status symbol to be punished. Among other things, this orientation has affected and continues to affect the entire Italia market, which has always seen, to give an example that concerns not only company cars but all cars, our fuel prices at the pump always at the top of the European rankings due to the strong incidence of the tax component. Governments change, the majorities that support them and even the interests they represent, but the persecution of the car remains. Even though car ownership was a status symbol in the first half of the last century and perhaps even in the early 1960s, it was precisely in those years that Italian industry put cars on the market, such as the Fiat Seicento and Fiat Cinquecento, which started the mass motorisation in our country as well. It follows that owning a car has long since ceased to be a status symbol and today, for almost all Italians, the car is an indispensable means of transport. This is so true that our country, partly due to an often costly and inefficient local public transport system, now has one of the highest motorisation rates in the world. The motorisation rate is the ratio of circulating cars to resident population. Today this ratio in Italia is 70 cars for every 100 inhabitants. And if we then consider the motorisation rate per household, given that there are 26.4 million households, according to the latest data from lstat, the motorisation rate is 1.6 cars per household. Given these numbers, does it make sense to still consider the car a status symbol to be persecuted with fiscal policy? Certainly not, and those who govern must realise this.