The European Commission has advanced a proposal to prevent the car manufacturers Operating in the EU they must pay the first fines for the violation of the new parameters of emissions of the cars sold starting from 2025. The European executive wants to dilate the controls, without changing the parameters.
In this way companies will have more time to reduce the emissions produced by new cars that they will sell, but the European Union will be able to continue to demand the decarbonisation of the sector.
The proposal of the European Union
The compromise found within the European Commission to avoid that the companies of the Automotive sector They must pay the fines for the excesses of emissions of the cars that have already sold since 2025 is based on a reduction in controls. Instead of demanding annual respect of the rules, the EU will demand it three years.
This means that, in 2027the Commission will examine the average emissions of cars sold in Europe from each company in 2025, in 2026 and 2027, and only then will it emit any sanctions. In this way, even late companies will also have time to recover. At the same time, the EU does not give up the project to reduce the emissions in the sector within the next ten years.
How the European rules work
By 2035 In fact, the European Union plans to completely prohibit the sale of cars with internal combustion engines. In addition, within the following 15 years, it will prohibit circulation. In the initial intentions, every year the European Commission should have verified that the automotive companies were in line with the program, which has a very limited time horizon.
However, this would have led to fines, even hundreds of millions of euros, in 2025. The companies in the sector therefore asked the Commission to postpone the implementation of the rules, to avoid having to take on additional costs in one year considered crucial. The European automotive is in fact going through a very difficult period.
Because it was necessary to postpone the fines
The fines of the European Commission for emissions would have risked precipitating the European automotive crisis. It is estimated that some groups, such as Volkswagen, should have paid more than 1.5 billion euros. The reasons for the difficulties of European companies are varied.
Cars cost more and more, due to the safety systems required by the laws of individual states and from European ones. Thanks to these rules, in recent years the dead on the roads have reduced drastically, but the prices have increased. European governments then stopped giving subsidies The automotive, considered harmful to the environment, and therefore the price of cars has become less and less accessible. The second -hand market, which allows consumers to save, has covered part of the demand, while that of new cars has slowed down.
The energy transition has been included in an already critical context. European electric cars are technologically less advanced than Chinese or American ones due to the poor investments In this field by the large groups of the Old Continent. Only in recent months some brands have been able to compete.
Finally, the German groups suffered the economic crisis of Germany. The end of the availability of low -cost gas from Russia and the collapse of Chinese demand, due to the pandemic crisis first and to the competition of Byd then, destroyed the paradigm on which decades of successes had been based, leading to a downsizing of Volkwagen, BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
