CO2 fines: the nightmare of European car manufacturers

"A spectre is hovering over Europe...". These are the fines with which Brussels intends to punish the automobile industry for manufacturing thermal cars, the only ones or almost only ones that citizens buy. Fines that from 1 January will be unavoidable as the permitted emission targets will be further lowered.

Many people talk and write about the banning the sale of thermal cars from 2035, but it is a minor topic that the industry deals with very little or not at all, both because none of the top managers will be there in ten years and because they know that it will most likely be cancelled, under pressure from consumers who want nothing to do with buying battery-powered cars. As we have always predicted and warned in these columns.

The fines. So far they would have been triggered above the average threshold of 116 g/km of CO2 (95 with the old NEDC homologation), but by selling a share of electrics and plug-in hybrids almost everyone has avoided them. And those who failed to do so bought credits from Tesla or Geely. From 2025 the limit drops by 19% to 94 g/km: unattainable for almost everyone.

To give you some figures, according to simulations by Dataforce, a market analysis company, the Volkswagen Group should have a BEV and plug-in sales share of 36%: last year it was 18% and this year it is as high as 16%. The Stellantis 2025 target would be 26%, but last year it didn't get to 18 and now it's above 13. Ford: '25 target almost at 35%, 2023 closed above 15 and 2024 is above 13. Yes because the news in recent months is that sales of plug-in cars are decreasing, not increasing, for several reasons. Some countries have stopped using taxpayers' money to incentivise these sales. Distribution networks have run out of capacity to register battery-powered cars that they then fail to sell. The pool of potential customers has been almost exhausted, which by no means equates to 100 per cent of motorists as some consultants pretend. Some help may come from individual city administrations, if they introduce traffic bans that force citizens to opt for plug-in cars. In the short term it works, but eventually comes the bill in the form of lost consensus. The manufacturers had wagered that they would succeed in getting a large proportion of their customers to change their car use habits, to the point where the resistant would eventually accept. On this bet they had announced, and partly undertaken, substantial investments in the production of plug-in cars and batteries. This was not the case, and in recent months they have all announced that they have slowed down or slowed down those investments, in the New as well as the Old World.