The recent history of the European car industry is not just a case of strategic error: it is a manifesto for how political arrogance can destroy decades of technological leadership. The European Union’s recent humiliating retreat from its 2035 ban on combustion engines is not a “revision” at all – it is a capitulation. It is the (belated) recognition that the market cannot be decreed by bureaucrats, whether in Brussels or elsewhere, but can be conquered by those who buy and, in this case, drive.
The goals imposed were, in their genesis, an exercise in fiction. An attempt was made to force a 100% electric transition in less than a decade, ignoring the abysmal technological and price gap, a charging network that stopped in time and the voluntary handing over of the keys to our market to China – which today dominates the battery value chain. The result of this “leap in the dark” without a network? A social earthquake that is decimating the European industrial middle class.
Let’s look at the case of Volkswagen. What was once the unshakable pride of German engineering is experiencing a a terrible year of surrender. For the first time in almost a century, Wolfsburg (the German “factory city” that serves as Volkswagen’s global headquarters) admits closing factories in its country. The numbers are a slap in the face: 35,000 families on the streets by 2030. When the German giant decides to sacrifice its DNA and historic units like Dresden, the diagnosis is multiple bankruptcy of a system that tried to sell what people don’t want or, worse, what they can’t afford.
Even more scandalous is the legacy left by Carlos Tavares at Stellantis. The Portuguese manager, once praised as the “wizard of the margins”, proved to be, after all, a short-term illusionist. Focused on brutal cuts to show profits, Tavares seems to have forgotten to invest in the product and listen to the market, especially the American one. While rival brands maintained pragmatism, Stellantis plunged into an electrification that few wanted. The outcome is a cruel irony: Tavares left the scene with an envelope in his pocket that would have reached 60 million euros – a prize for failure – leaving behind platforms that are true Frankensteins. Take the new Fiat 500: designed as an electric manifesto, it had to be urgently operated to receive a combustion engine because customers simply refused to buy the battery-powered version. Result, it is the slowest hybrid (in acceleration) on the market! But it may sell something… more than the version inherited from the Portuguese manager.
Faced with this scorched earth, e-fuels (synthetic fuels) were already there, as a transition option, but politicians didn’t want to know, with their ears full of political correctness lobbies. They only appear now, like the revenge of common sense. Technological neutrality must be the new north – or tens of millions will be left unemployed. There is no environmental or economic logic in condemning a 7 or 8 year old, perfectly functional diesel to be scrapped, in the name of an electrical purity that does not exist. If we can recycle CO2 from the atmosphere to power the engines we already have, why would we force ordinary citizens to go into debt for an electric vehicle that depreciates faster than it charges?
The EU’s retreat to the 90% target in 2035 is the end of the fantasy. It is a return to the real world, where freedom of movement cannot be a luxury and where industry cannot be sacrificed on the altar of a green arrogance that, ironically, was making Europe more dependent on Chinese coal. The combustion engine did not die – it was, rather, rehabilitated by reality.