Contrary to its prior ambitious push, the European Union will not completely ban gas vehicles by 2035.
As we currently sit here about to roll into 2026, we were roughly a decade out from EU countries enacting a total ban on gasoline vehicle sales within the bloc. The key word is “were“, as the EU is now backing off that plan before it goes into effect. That development comes as German chancellor Friedrich Merz urged the European Commission to rethink its plan — a move automakers have been pleading for over the past four years since the initial announcement to crack down on gasoline vehicles in the next 10 years.
“It is good that the Commission is now opening up regulation in the automotive sector following the clear signal from the German government,” Merz said after the decision to ease its emissions goal. “Greater openness to technology and more flexibility are right steps to take in order to better align climate targets, market realities, businesses and jobs.”
The rollback still calls for fairly aggressive goals, centering around a 90% reduction in automakers’ fleet emissions by 2035, rather than 100%. That will still take electric vehicles, biofuels and so-called “e-fuels” and less polluting manufacturing processes llike low-carbon steel to achieve, but it will still fundamentally allow gas vehicles to continue on.
With the stronger EV push in recent years, Europe has gained substantial ground on EV adoption, accounting for just over 20% of market share as of 2024, according to European Environment Agency figures. Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Norway) particularly lead the way in electric car market share, with new vehicles account for more than half of new vehicle registrations.
The reaction, must like the issue itself, is polarized.
As it stands at time of writing, the European Commission’s proposal still needs to be approved by the EU parliament. Lawmakers in the body’s most prominent party, the EPP, expressed support for the plan, making it likely this proposal will be the bloc’s official policy moving forward.
Automakers and some national governments, like Germany, Italy and Poland, have intensely lobbied the EU for less stringent requirements for the sake of the region’s competitiveness in the current consumer climate. Rising costs and tariffs abroad, they say, hurt the industry’s chances to sustain itself as customer demand for EVs does not align with the goal to move entirely to battery-electric vehicles by 2035. Options like hybrids and plug-in hybrids, they contend, are a sensible pivot in terms of lowering emissions and keeping costs in check.
On the other side, Chinese firms (like BYD, for example) have made significant progress on EVs in recent years. Some have criticized the decision to relax emissions regulations as ceding the bloc’s current edge on electric cars to China, which may seize on the void other automakers leave behind as they pull back from such heavy EV investment.
Some governments within the EU, including Spain and France, back the 2021-era plan and emissions targets for 2035. They urged EU leaders to “stay on track”, arguing that zero-emissions vehicles are crucial to actually achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 — another ambitious aim of the original plan.
The EU’s looser regulations by 2035 also come on the heels of the US government’s decision to scrap more stringent fuel economy standards. Together, environmental groups assert the resulting emissions, both from manufacturing and running internal combustion vehicles over their lifetime, will accelerate climate change in the coming decades. These selfsame groups also assert the longer governments fail to take aggressive enough action, the harder it will be to curtail emissions as transportation and energy demand, backed by fossil fuels, continues to grow.
