The European Commission’s decision to soften car emissions regulation has pleased nobody and endangered everyone, Thomas Pellerin-Carlin, a French energy researcher-turned-lawmaker tells EU Perspectives podcast.
When the European Commission published its automotive package in December 2025, it replaced the combustion engine ban from the ‘Fit for 55’ package with a 90 per cent emissions reduction target. Member of the European Parliament Thomas Pellerin-Carlin (S&D/FRA), a former energy researcher who sits on the Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, was unsparing in his verdict. “The Commission made the drastically bad political choice that we are suffering from,” he told EU Perspectives’ podcast host Jennifer Baker. “They opened Pandora’s box and all the silly ideas have entered the debate now.”
The timing could hardly have been worse. European carmakers already face fierce Chinese competition across all vehicle segments and the chaos of American trade tariffs. This is a particular problem for Stellantis, which depends heavily on the North American market.
Adding regulatory uncertainty to an already turbulent environment, Mr Pellerin-Carlin argued, was an act of self-harm. A more targeted flexibility measure, introduced earlier in 2025, had been sufficient. What came in December was something else entirely.
Sovereignty, fossils, and the nostalgia trap
The Commission’s reasoning, he suggested, was neither economic nor strategic. “The Commission decided to listen to irrational political pressure,” he said, “divorced from the economic and physical reality, on top of very short-sighted vested interests from one or two car manufacturers.”
The result was a policy that managed to be incoherent on its own terms: one week Brussels proposed slowing car electrification; the next, it published an electricity package designed to accelerate it. “Either you want to increase electrification or you want to decrease it,” Mr Pellerin-Carlin said. “The Commission is trying to do both things at the same time.”
Behind the policy confusion lies a more fundamental question about what Europe actually produces. The continent generates roughly three per cent of the oil it consumes and 10 per cent of the gas, but it is a net exporter of electricity. For Mr Pellerin-Carlin, the logic is therefore straightforward. “Either we want to be sovereign, in which case we need to go for electrification,” he said, “or we want to stay in that kind of fossil fuel nostalgia. In which case we need to find a supply of fossil fuel.”
The road of the horse
He is dismissive of what he calls “fossil fuel nostalgia”: an emotional attachment, concentrated among a specific demographic and political tendency, to technologies such as the internal combustion engine and the gas boiler. The phenomenon puzzles him, he admitted, as he recalled seeing pictures of combustion engines across social media. “I understand people want to see pictures of cars,” he said, “but why the engine?”
The combustion engine, he noted, was a cutting-edge technology — in the 19th century. The comparison he reaches for is the horse: still present, still ridden, but no longer the primary means of moving people and goods.
At 5am in a rural area, you will never have public transport.
— MEP Thomas Pellerin-Carlin (S&D/FRA)
Alternative fuels—biofuels and e-fuels—receive a more nuanced treatment. As an energy researcher, Mr Pellerin-Carlin insists the debate only makes sense if you start with the use case. E-fuels are thermodynamically expensive: large amounts of electricity produce relatively small quantities of fuel.
That makes them appropriate for sectors with no realistic alternative. These are military aviation, deep-sea shipping, heavy agriculture, potentially long-haul flights. “The military can afford the cost of energy,” he said. “The cost of energy is a very small part of the cost of warfare.” For mass private car use, they are suboptimal by any engineering or economic measure.
The limits of retreat
The case of Indonesia is instructive. The world’s largest biofuel producer, and the fourth most populous country on earth, has nonetheless committed to electrifying its entire transport sector — two-wheelers, cars, trucks, and buses. “If biofuels were the future for cars, there would be one country in the world championing that, and that would be Indonesia,” Mr Pellerin-Carlin said. “But look at what the president of Indonesia has been saying. He wants to electrify everything that has to do with transportation.” There are, he noted, no green party members in the Indonesian parliament. The choice is thermodynamics, not ideology.
On electric vehicle uptake, Mr Pellerin-Carlin is sanguine. Battery electric cars now account for around 25 per cent of new car sales in Europe; plug-in hybrids add another 10 per cent. The much-discussed ‘range anxiety’ (the fear of being stranded without charge) he reframes as anxiety in the clinical sense: the fear of a fear, rather than a response to a real threat.
“In more than 95 per cent of the cases, the moment when they decide to use an electric car, that anxiety disappears,” he said, “because they just see that it’s actually extremely easy.” For most Europeans, daily travel falls well within battery range. The exception, a long holiday drive, requires one planned stop. For parents of young children, this is not obviously a hardship, the French lawmaker said.
The China conundrum
The Chinese competition argument is where Mr Pellerin-Carlin becomes most pointed. Some colleagues, he noted, advocate slowing electrification as a defensive measure against Chinese carmakers. The logic does not survive scrutiny. China’s share of the European car market is actually higher in the hybrid segment than in the battery electric one.
China is competitive across all vehicle types: combustion, hybrid, and electric alike. “Thinking that we need to dismantle the regulatory environment to protect us from China just makes no sense,” he said, “because China is as good at making internal combustion engine cars as PHEVs as battery electric cars.”
We do not want to lose our car industry to China the way we lost our textile industry.
— MEP Thomas Pellerin-Carlin (S&D/FRA)
Regulatory stability (i.e., maintaining the CO2 standards) is necessary but not sufficient. Mr Pellerin-Carlin points to the US as a cautionary tale: the Trump administration’s assault on electric vehicle policy produced asset devaluation at American carmakers. The same would follow in Europe if the far-right coalition in the current Parliament succeeded in dismantling the CO2 framework. Additional tools are needed: an Accelerator Act, European preference policies, social leasing schemes, and trade defence measures. “We do not want to lose our car industry to China the way we lost our textile industry,” he said.
Made in Europe
On ‘Made in Europe’ provisions, the industry is divided along lines that Brussels, with its fondness for premium brands, tends to obscure. Suppliers favour local content rules; original equipment manufacturers do not, because such rules reduce their ability to play European suppliers off against cheaper Asian or American ones.
Within the OEM camp, Mercedes and BMW, both with significant Chinese shareholders and large export ambitions, fear trade retaliation and resist ‘Made in Europe’ requirements. Stellantis, Volkswagen, and Renault, which together account for the majority of cars sold and workers employed in Europe, are a different matter.
Members of the latter group serve the working and middle classes. Their interests, Mr Pellerin-Carlin suggested, deserve rather more weight in Brussels than they currently receive.
The car, the city, and the cheese factory
The broader question, whether Europe should be building a car-free future, gets a geographically honest answer. In Paris, Mr Pellerin-Carlin would favour near-total restriction of private cars, limited to doctors, plumbers, and people with disabilities. But he also mentions Châteauneuf-d’Entraunes, a village of 600 inhabitants spread across 3,000 hectares deep in the Alps. Efficient public transport is simply not feasible there at any realistic scale, he admitted.
I understand people want to see pictures of cars, but why the engine?
— MEP Thomas Pellerin-Carlin (S&D/FRA)
The policy goal, he argued, should be to maximise the freedom to live car-free for those who can. But it should also acknowledge that at least half, probably 60 per cent, of Europeans will continue to depend on private cars for reasons of geography or working hours. The cheese factory worker who must be at the vat by 5am in rural Normandy will not be catching a bus. “At 5am in a rural area,” Mr Pellerin-Carlin said, “you will never have public transport.”
Policy that ignores that reality is not green ambition. It is the same kind of wishful thinking that produced the December automotive package in the first place.
