The European regulation on new cars is more relevant than ever!

In recent decades, new cars have moved upmarket: they have become larger and increasingly well-equipped... Rather than exaggerating the responsibility of safety standards or blaming electric cars for a pre-existing trend, we need to pay attention to the demographic fundamentals of the car fleet: it is now growing more slowly and is made up of better cars than in the past, cars that are more practical in everyday use and more durable. Consumers are therefore making rational decisions by keeping their cars longer, while new car sales are falling back on an increasingly narrow audience.

Electric cars can help break this vicious circle, thanks to their objective qualities: very low running costs, high reliability and extremely long life expectancy – enough to give more buyers reasons to turn to new cars. But for this to happen, the still tentative move downmarket in the electric car (EV) offer needs to accelerate. This is the challenge addressed by the European initiative for affordable "E-cars" announced in September by Ursula von der Leyen.

A few regulatory adjustments could promote these affordable cars, such as exempting small battery cars from lane-keeping and anti-drowsiness aids. But these alone will not provide the powerful incentive needed for these cars to sell in large numbers and thus become truly affordable.

However, existing regulations, by forcing greater adoption of electric vehicles and giving small cars a clear advantage from the beginning of 2025, are pushing precisely towards affordable electric vehicles. It is no coincidence that the ë-C3 and Panda, the future iD.Polo and iD.1, the electric Twingo, etc. are now arriving on the market. To reinforce this movement, push for the development of even more affordable cars and encourage sales, it is crucial not to relax these regulations. It is within this framework, and protected by the commercial defense instruments that are necessary today, that technological catch-up with the Chinese automotive industry – whose lead is unfortunately not limited to electric vehicles – can be achieved. 

However, those regulations operate through high steps, every five years. This leads to phases of acute concern when those steps near – hence the current debates. In order to avoid repeating this experience in 2030 and 2035, it would be legitimate and necessary to smooth the regulatory constraints over the period 2028-2035, or to keep the current approach when assessing compliance, relying on a three-year moving average. But the overall constraint should not be weakend – which can only be guaranteed by independent experts’ scrutiny.

The HCSP teams would like to extend their warmest thanks to Bernard Jullien, automotive academic and consultant , former director of Gerpisa (https://gerpisa.org/) and author of numerous books, and Patrick Pélata, president of the Académie des technologies and former deputy CEO of the Renault group, for the many insights they provided prior to the drafting of this text.

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[1] INSEE, the National institute for statistics and economic studies, estimates that the French automotive industry has gone from 193,400 jobs in 2005 to 118,200 in 2015, a drop of 39% in ten years.