Do Europeans dream of electric cars?

Passenger cars and light vans are respectively responsible for around 16% and 3% of total EU emissions of CO2. Almost 330,000 premature deaths in the EU can be attributed every year to air pollution as well as numerous illnesses including heart disease, cancer, asthma, lung disease and stroke. Overall, the health costs attributable to air pollution caused by road transport have been estimated at €67 billion to €80 billion annually in the EU.

All good reasons to strike an agreement for a new law, last the one designed in 2023 by EU legislators. Under the new rules, carmakers will be required to gradually reduce the CO2 intensity of their fleets between 2025 and 2034, and all new cars sold from 2035 will have to be zero-emissions.

Despite its almost obvious positive effects in the long term, the law is now being brought into question by European conservatives (EPP) and countries like Czechia, Italy, and France. This challenge may affect some 14 million people around Europe employed directly and indirectly by the automotive industry.

German carmaker Volkswagen announced in December 2024 that it will cut 15,000 jobs to remain competitive with China. Excessive costs of switching to electric vehicles and a drop in demand have led to a fall in profits in recent years.

In Italy, the resignation of Carlos Tavares as CEO of Stellantis (former Fiat) has highlighted the damage of a profit strategy pursued in recent years, and the case of the GKN automotive supplier (where workers on the Florence plant have been unpaid for over one year before it was shut) is also emblematic: Silvia Giagnoni wrote a book about their experience.

Here we approach the frontier of climate journalism, where it is asked to explain what is fair, what is not, and why.

It was June when Matej Moravansky addressed the topic for Denik Referendum: “The political ideology of motoring is experiencing a major victory (...) Owning a car is presented in our society as almost a basic human right. Motoring has become an ideology that has achieved undeniable political success in our country and throughout the European Union”, Moravansky writes.

“Perhaps in its purest form, the phenomenon of political motoring has appeared in the Czech Republic. The electoral coalition between the Přísaha movement and the Motoristé party, led by Petr Macinka, an employee of the Václav Klaus Institute and the right-hand man of the former president, placed Filip Turk, the owner of influential social media channels and a former racing driver, at the head of the candidate list. He led the coalition to ten percent, thus securing a mandate for himself and Nikola Bartůšek as MEP.”

The spirit of the Motorists' Party is perhaps best captured by the ‘Manual for Removing Eco-Terrorist Obstacles on the Road’, which the party published on its website. It states: 

"This manual was created in a situation where terrorism against the general population has spread in countries previously characterized by Western-style democracy, the denominator of which is the imposition of guilt for a certain state of planet Earth and at the same time the inability or rather the unwillingness of public authorities to vigorously confront this terrorism, since representatives of the terrorist movement are often already members of governments at the national level and in local governments."

Conspiracy here combines with the right-wing defense of the “normal” world against political structures riddled with “ecoterrorism.”

That was just before last year’s European Parliament’s elections in June 2024, when the Green Deal was beginning to experience a strong backlash.

More recently, Virginie Malingre wrote about the crisis of the automotive sector for Le Monde. She effectively summed it up: “Europe fumbles to save its automotive industry. Member states are looking for a formula to support the automotive sector, which is undergoing a major shift towards electric vehicles and is threatened by Chinese competition. […] The fate that the European Union will reserve for an automobile industry, today in full crisis, will be emblematic.”

Yet, solutions exist, according to Linnea Nelli, who in Altreconomia answers to the question "What to do for a just transition in the automotive sector?” “The conditions for an unjust transition in the European automotive sector are all there. An industrial policy is urgently needed.” “In general”, Nelli writes, “the Italian automotive sector is having difficulty in dealing with the transition due to the relocation of production activities, not only low added value, to Eastern countries (such as Stellantis in Poland); the sale of companies and plants in the component sector to foreign multinationals that invest in research and development and production for electrification in plants in other countries, especially near central research and development centers and in countries with low labor costs; the lack of investment and the reduction of staff in the corporate transformation from Fiat, Fca to Stellantis. In this context, public intervention is weak and late.”

A glance at 2025 is not promising, either. Germany is holding its parliamentary elections on February 23 and the electoral campaign is likely to happen on the industrial battlefield: as part of CLEW's 2025 preview series, the head of the think tank Zukunft KlimaSozial Brigitte Knopf says affordability of transition is a key topic for the next government.