Europe is not facilitating the transition to electric cars, despite its rhetoric on climate change • Semanario Universidad

Lillestrom, Norway

The electric car is a key link in the European climate plan, but its widespread use on the continent's roads faces major obstacles a decade before the sale of new combustion cars is banned in 2035.

Sales of “zero emission” rechargeable vehicles in the European Union have stagnated, or even declined, in recent months.

So far this year, electric cars account for 12% or less of total sales in Europe, compared to 14.6% last year.

This decrease is mainly due to data from Germany, the main European market, which ended support for the purchase of these models at the end of 2023.

The Secretary General of the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA), Sigrid de Vries, cannot hide her “concern”.

Less than 30% of Europeans say they would be willing to buy an electric car, according to the Electric Vehicle Manufacturers Association, and more than half would rule out spending more than 35,000 euros ($37,600) on a car, a price range that includes very few electric models.

“The 2035 deadline is really tomorrow, especially if we talk about production cycles,” De Vries explained at a conference last week in Lillestrom, near Oslo.

“We only have ten years to go from 15% (of clean vehicles) to 100%,” he warned.

At the end of 2023, the share of electric cars sold in a third of the 27 European Union countries did not exceed 5%, a threshold at which we can talk about mass adoption, according to the economic information agency Bloomberg.

The car is the number one means of travel for Europeans and accounts for around 15% of the continent's carbon dioxide emissions, so decarbonising it is essential to meeting the bloc's climate targets.

Although not a member of the European Union, Norway, the host country of this conference, plays a role model despite being a large hydrocarbon producer.

Thanks to very favorable tax measures, electric vehicles, led by Tesla, represented 90% of new vehicle registrations in the first quarter. The goal is to reach 100% in 2025.

Brands such as Volkswagen and Volvo have already stopped marketing their combustion models in this Scandinavian kingdom.

“The upward trend is clear.”

The transition is slower in other countries.

The UK has postponed for five years the ban on the sale of new combustion vehicles, which is now set to begin in 2035, a deadline that many do not consider realistic.

The fluctuation in sales does not worry Nissan, which is one of the first traditional manufacturers to enter the rechargeable car sector with the LEAF model.

Its regional vice president in charge of electricity and connected services, Guillaume Pelletreau, explained to AFP that “it is this way and will always be this way.”

“There was a really strong start to the electricity wave in the last couple of years and now the process is starting to return to normal a little bit. Despite everything, we see a clear upward trend.”

Groups such as Volkswagen, Stellantis and Renault are planning to launch cheaper electric models in the coming months and are relying on hybrid models to boost their sales.

In France, large government subsidies to the most modest families allowed sales to rise significantly for a few weeks.

Charging points

One of the obstacles cited most by the sector is the difficulty of quickly deploying adequate infrastructure across the territory.

In the European Union, more than half of charging points are concentrated in two countries: Germany and the Netherlands, according to ACEA.

In Spain, where consumers replace their cars every 14 years on average, 65% of drivers park their cars on the street, which further complicates the process of charging cars at home, says Isabel Gorgoso, director of “new mobility” at the energy group Cepsa.

“Spain was Norway for ten years,” he said.

Other problems are a backlog of regulations (up to nine per year) at the European level and incoherence of national policies, which could be exacerbated by the rise of populist movements that often question climate change.

De Vries, of the Association of East Asian Nations (ACEA), is concerned about “high-stakes” European Parliament elections in June, which could strengthen populist formations skeptical of the fight against climate change.

“What happens in the coming months could determine the fate of the European auto industry,” he said.