Softening the 2035 combustion ban is realism, but the whiplash has a price

Is a ban still a ban if it keeps getting renegotiated? Europe's 2035 combustion deadline has been so thoroughly sanded down that the better question may be who pays for the sanding.

The latest turn: as CarBuzz summarizes Reuters' reporting, France and Germany have jointly presented a plan to revise the 2035 rules. Instead of a full ban, automakers would cut vehicle emissions by 90% from 2021 levels. The earlier proposal would have made them offset the remaining 10%, including through different fuels. The new one drops that obligation. Reuters also reported that Germany's chancellor said Italy backs the plan. A second element would limit government purchases and incentives to vehicles with a certain share of EU content, with Britain counted in. Nothing has passed yet.

The retreat is realism, and pretending otherwise is dishonest

Let's be fair to the pragmatists. The Reuters reporting on the Commission's earlier move, republished by Les Echos, noted that European carmakers were seeing demand below forecasts, with buyers balking at pricier models and charging infrastructure falling short. Ford CEO Jim Farley said that, in his view, this is not a sustainable reality in Europe today. You can disagree with the messenger and still admit the market data is stubborn.

A 90% cut is not a rollback to the old world either. As CarBuzz notes, EVs would still have to be extremely common to hit it, so automakers can't keep selling combustion cars at anything like today's rate. In our view, that is the right shape: a hard target with room for a few niches, such as enthusiast cars or vehicles for rural areas where charging remains a problem. A zero-tailpipe cliff edge made for good slogans and bad industrial planning.

But the loser is whoever believed the first deadline

Here is the part the pragmatists skip. Companies that poured money into batteries, platforms and plants did so against a legal timetable. Polestar CEO Michael Lohscheller argued in that Reuters piece that the technology, the charging network and the consumers are all ready, and asked what everyone is still waiting for. ChargePoint CEO Rick Wilmer said the change would have an impact, and the EV industry argued it would hurt investment and widen the gap with China.

We can't prove that investment will fall, because the documentation doesn't give us the numbers. But the mechanism is obvious. Every revision teaches boardrooms that targets are negotiable, and that pressure beats planning. The carmakers that pushed for looser targets, Volkswagen and Stellantis among them according to Reuters, are rewarded. The ones that moved early are left holding capacity built for a deadline that no longer bites.

Buyers get whiplash too. Someone who switched to an EV on the strength of the 2035 promise now watches the policy blur. Meanwhile, one French guide even suggests combustion prices could stabilize or fall as supply stays plentiful. That guide comes from a used-car seller, so take it with salt, but the logic is plausible and it would hurt the early adopter's resale math.

The fix is predictability, not another deadline fight

Note how long this has dragged on. A review clause was long planned for 2026, the Commission unveiled its reversal in December 2025, and now France and Germany are pushing to rewrite it again in October 2026. That is at least three acts of one play. Spain, according to the Distinxion guide, opposed delay precisely because it had invested heavily in the electric supply chain. That's the constituency nobody in Berlin seems to be speaking for.

What would we do? Lock the 90% figure and stop touching it for a decade. Pair it with real support where buyers actually hesitate: charging, and incentives rather than mandates, which the carmakers themselves point to as having worked in Belgium. And treat the EU-content rule with caution. CarBuzz itself says its specifics could change to get the proposal through, so it's a bargaining chip as much as a strategy.

The verdict: softening 2035 was defensible. Softening it in installments is not. If Brussels wants carmakers to spend billions on electrification, it has to make the rulebook the one thing they can count on.