Europe rebuffs automakers’ pleas to let them lose the EV race to China
European automakers asked the EU Commission to review and potentially modify the bloc’s 2035 all-EV target at an auto summit on Friday, but the commission is reportedly standing firm despite the industry’s big push this week for more leniency.
In 2021, Europe announced a target to go all-electric by 2035. It was part of a greater package of climate reforms designed to target a 55% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030 and full climate neutrality by 2050.
But a lot has changed since then. European EV sales and market share have continued to rise, but even more importantly, Chinese EV sales have accelerated rapidly… much faster than those in Europe. In 2020, Europe had 11% plug-in (BEV + PHEV) market share and China was at 5%; but in the interim, China leapfrogged Europe by hitting 47% plug-in share in 2024, while Europe only reached 24%. BEV-only numbers are lower, but BEVs still outsell PHEVs significantly.
This has been accompanied by a significant rise in Chinese EV exports as well. As China’s EV manufacturing effort ramps up rapidly due to forward-looking industrial strategy and encouragement of EV startups, the country has started to produce advanced EVs so cheaply that slow-moving Western automakers are finding it hard to compete (after putting in little effort to do so).
And so, what are the automakers to do? They’ve already tried nothing, and they’re all out of ideas. So they’re doing what they usually do: going to the teacher to beg for an extension.
Automakers make a final push for leniency on EU emissions
Friday’s auto summit was reportedly the third and last “crisis meeting” between automakers and the EU Commission, timed at the end of the largest European auto show, IAA Munich. Automakers and some governments spent the week agitating for leniency on CO2 targets and to extend the life of the internal combustion engine.
The EU reportedly agreed to an early review of its 2035 targets, but otherwise stood firm, stating that “no matter what, the future of cars is electric.” The reforms included a mechanism by which the EU could review its progress towards its targets, with the review set to happen in 2026, but that review will reportedly now happen this year.
The argument is that automakers don’t have enough time to get up to 100% EV sales by 2035, having only advanced from 11%->24% between 2020 and 2024. But despite automakers’ protestations, China’s move from 5%->47% in the same time frame shows that a lot more is possible than European automakers are letting on.
The review comes after Europe already loosened rules for automakers earlier this year. In March, the Commission gave automakers “breathing room,” slightly extending the deadline for emissions compliance for the 2025-2027 model years (which they now seem on track to meet).
Ironically, this “breathing room” for automakers would result in less “breathing room” for actual humans with lungs, who will have to breathe more pollution as a result of the automakers’ inability to stop poisoning everyone.
Despite that Europe is reportedly standing firm on its targets, it may offer some minor flexibility in its review.
What form the reviewed targets might take is not yet clear. But some automakers and government entities like Germany’s CDU (whose leader, Friedrich Merz, said the auto industry should “not limit itself to a single solution”) are asking for “solutions” that still rely on combustion, and extend the lifespan of polluting, complex and wasteful gasoline engines.
Automakers want clean fuels which… aren’t actually clean
EU President Ursula Von der Leyen reportedly says that the EU will hold firm, but did not rule out potential exceptions for plug-in hybrid vehicles with primarily use electricity but have a combustion engine as a fallback.
However, allowing plug-in hybrids would be folly, given research released just this week from Transport & Environment showing plug-in hybrids emit five times as many emissions on average in the real-world as they do in testing regimes.
Another common request made by automakers has involved “biofuels” or “e-fuels,” clean-sounding names for something that is still inherently wasteful. The EU has already made an exception for these fuels in its 2035 rules.
While synthetic “e-fuels” created from renewable electricity are principally carbon-free and are obviously better than fossil-based fuels, internal combustion engines are still desperately inefficient, with 20-30% efficiency, as compared to ~90% efficiency for electric motors. Putting that electricity directly into a BEV is a far more efficient way to convert electricity to motion than using the electricity to create synthetic fuels, then shipping and inefficiently combusting those fuels.
For biofuels, which are also carbon neutral, the land and water required is an order of magnitude larger than what’s needed for renewable electricity sources used to fuel electric vehicles. In order to fuel all the world’s cars with biofuels, we would need about twice as much land and rainfall as is available on Earth.
And while it’s nice to think that all these combustion engines might suddenly convert to using biofuels, that seems unlikely to happen. So, continuing to build these engines means they will continue to combust things that, mathematically, must remain underground and uncombusted.
Meanwhile, climate change continues to accelerate as human emissions continue to rise. This is the largest and objectively the most important challenge that humanity has ever created for itself, and one that Europe needs to confront boldly.
Finally, one auto CEO speaks the truth
Thankfully, somebody pointed out the ridiculousness of this debate.
Audi CEO Gernot Döllner said this week that the constant bickering and begging by the auto industry is “counterproductive.”
“I don’t know of any better technology than the electric car for advancing CO2 reduction in transportation in the coming years. But even apart from climate protection, the electric car is simply the better technology,” said Döllner, who said that the constant debates over whether inferior combustion engines should be preserved are “counterproductive and unsettle customers.”
Meanwhile, Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius, who also heads the European Automobile Manufacturer’s Association (ACEA), went exactly in the wrong direction with his comments, saying that “hybrids and efficient high-tech combustion engines should remain part of the way forward, otherwise we risk acceptance and jobs.”
The actual reality of the situation is that Europe will lose jobs if it fails on the EV transition… which it already is, and will fail even harder with the complacency that Källenius and Merz have asked for. Doubling down on combustion will result in failure in the face of superior competition from overseas.
At least one CEO, Döllner, actually seems to get it. Although, he did become CEO shortly before Audi tamped down on its EV push, so maybe he needs to listen to his own words.
An unnamed European official, quoted by Euronews, also injected some reality into the situation. After Friday’s talks, the person said “even if the Commission took down these targets, global competition would set them for the industry,” recognizing that superior Chinese EVs are already out-competing European brands and that competition may result in change regardless of any futzing about the automakers beg the EU to do.
A retreat would surrender to Chinese competition
The current situation in Europe involves rising competition from the aforementioned Chinese EV exports. While Chinese share of European EV sales is still rather low at around 11%, that share has been growing rapidly. And it’s growing because, despite the tariff Europe levies on Chinese EVs, these cars still offer quite a good value proposition, and some have better software features than those available from slower-moving traditional automakers.
This is one thing that has European automakers scared about the EV transition. But instead of recognizing that they are behind and need to catch up, they are falling back to the default mode for large businesses – begging government to slow things down so that they can maintain their dominant position. But that hasn’t worked before, and it won’t work now, and thankfully Europe seems not to be taking the bait.
The only way that European automakers can confront the rising challenge from Chinese EVs, and work to solve climate change which their products are the largest single cause of, and which the transportation industry specifically is not doing enough to fix, is by committing more seriously to the EV transition, not by begging the government to let them move more slowly.
Notably, the same sort of begging is not happening in China. When new regulations threatened to destroy the market for ICE cars in China and leave millions of cars unsellable, Chinese auto dealers did ask for a reprieve… but only for six months, in order to sell off existing inventory, while also calling on all levels of industry and government to take the EV transition more seriously, rather than asking anyone to pump the brakes on it.
And none of these Chinese EVs are having any trouble with emissions limits, either. They are not poisoning the lungs (and every other organ) of Europeans – that’s being done by the combustion engine makers.
The only answer is to accelerate, not decelerate
All the above said, Europe’s target probably should be reviewed… because 2035 is not early enough. The faster we work to confront climate change, the better. No matter how expensive it seems it might be to solve the problem that we collectively have spent the last century and a half causing (and have supercharged in the last 30 years), that cost will only get higher as time goes on and as more damage is done.
Many studies have pointed out that the faster we solve this problem, the cheaper it will be to fix, so every moment lost as a result of the auto industry begging for more time only represents more cost, death, and disruption for humanity and for all species on Earth.
Lobbying to slow down the transition therefore does not just harm European industry, but also would harm all life on Earth. And, as Audi’s CEO pointed out, debate over the simple truth of electric drive’s superiority is counterproductive. The European Commission is right to hold firm on its targets, and should rebuff any further pleas to weaken them from the auto industry, the very industry that got itself, and all of us, into this problem in the first place.
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Autonomous taxi company Waymo faced scrutiny last month when a car was caught on video illegally passing a stopped school bus that was letting children off in Atlanta. Now, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is looking into it.
Georgia State Representative Clint Crowe seemed stunned after being presented with video of a Waymo driverless car illegally passing a stopped school bus on Briarcliff Road in Atlanta last month. “I’m a big fan of new technologies and emerging technologies and I think that driverless cars are going to become more prevalent,” he told local NBC news affiliate WBIR. “But we got [sic] to think about how they’re going to comply with the law.”
WBIR | Waymo illegally passes school bus
Crowe co-sponsored Addy’s Law in 2024. The legislation was named after 8-year-old Addy Pierce, who was killed in Henry County after being struck while crossing the street to get to her bus. The law stiffened penalties for illegally passing a stopped school bus, carrying penalties of up to $1,000 in fines and even jail time.
According to Crowe, those rules still apply to autonomous vehicles. “The majority of our traffic laws, the penalty is usually a fine and or driver’s license suspension. These cars don’t have a driver, so they don’t have a driver’s license and so we’re really going to have to rethink who’s the responsible party, who’s going to be responsible for being in control of that vehicle and who’s going to be the operator of that vehicle,” he said.
Crowe believes manufacturers should face stronger consequences when their vehicles break the law, saying the $1,000 fine doesn’t go far enough.
Now, thanks to pressure from social media and politicians like Crowe and Geoirgia State Senator Rick Williams, who helped co-author Addy’s Law, it seems like NHTSA is getting involved.
Prompted by media reports, the US Department of Transportation issued an investigation regarding Waymo’s AV, which states that, “the AV initially stopped, but then drove around the front of the bus by briefly turning right to avoid running into the bus’s right front end, then turning left to pass in front of the bus, and then turning further left and driving down the roadway past the entire left side of the bus. During this maneuver, the Waymo AV passed the bus’s extended crossing control arm near disembarking students (on the bus’s right side) and passed the extended stop arm on the bus’s left side.”
While it remains to be seen how much work NHTSA is actually doing amid the ongoing shutdown of the Federal government, it’s worth noting that, regardless of the outcome, Senator Williams said he plans to introduce new legislation that would hold driverless car companies accountable with higher fines if their vehicles violate traffic laws. If that passes in Georgia, it could set the stage for politicians across the US and even abroad to use similar fins to halt the spread of autonomous taxis in their states.
“Driverless cars should be stopped until it can be figured out,” said Williams. “We should not have this on the road. It’s too dangerous for our children.”
You can read NHTSA summary, below.
We’re typically pretty tech- and autonomous-forward here, but as a parent I would absolutely lose my s*** if a Waymo or Robotaxi or whatever else ran over my kid. but I’ve also seen plenty of human drivers blow past a school bus with a knee on the steering wheel and both eyes glued firmly to their phones. Let us know who you’d be more ready to trust with your kids’ lives in the comments.
SOURCES: WBIR, NHTSA, via School Transportation News.
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![Lion Electric school bus warranties voided, leaving districts stuck [update]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/07/unforgivable.jpg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Nobody ever says “this is business” before doing something nice, and the recently reborn Lion Electric company is keeping that streak alive by doing the unthinkable to cut costs: they’re going to void the warranties on hundreds of electric school buses.
UPDATE 01NOV2025: two Lion Electric buses caught fire, now they’re in more trouble.
This past summer, the fallout from Lion Electric’s dissolution reached a critical mass, and the company’s new owners — the Quebec-based real estate giants Groupe MACH — decided to cancel the warranties on electric school buses sold in the US, leaving many districts with unsafe or broken down buses and no recourse to get their money back while the brand continued to take orders and make money in Canada.
Now, it seems like even the Canadian fleets have some serious safety concerns. School Transportation News and the CBC report that The Quebec Ministry of Education has ordered Lion school bus models be taken out of service immediately after a pair of LionC electric buses caught fire in Montreal, Quebec on Sept 9th, leading to disruptions across the province and a renewed scrutiny of Lion bus safety (Lion360 diesel-powered school buses, which Lion manufactured prior to only producing electric vehicles in 2017, were also affected by the issue).
Lion Bus (the company’s new, official name), has issued an inspection bulletin detailing a four-hour repair, which reads, “We have identified some potential anomalies in a sub-component of the HVAC system that Lion obtains from a third-party supplier … in the interest of safety above all else, we request that Lion bus operators perform the following inspections and modifications: mandatory inspection of several low-voltage electrical connections, replacement of certain electrical connectors, replace fan fuses with less powerful ones, adding a fuse to an HVAC control panel circuit. This inspection and modification procedure must be carried out on all Lion360 (diesel) and LionC 3rd generation and earlier buses (Gen3, Gen2 and Gen1).”
No word yet on whether the issue impacts any of the few Lion Electric buses still on US roads, but remember: Lion Bus wouldn’t help you if it did.
You can read about Lion’s decision to leave US school districts holding the bag on its troubled products in the original July post, below, then let us know how you feel about Groupe MACH’s handling of the situation in the comments section at the bottom of the page.
The warranty story
In a letter issued to exiting Lion Electric customers last week, Deloitte Restructuring announced that the warranties on all Lion vehicles purchased outside of the company’s home Province of Quebec are null and void – leaving dozens of school districts in the lurch with stranded assets that won’t get fixed, and can’t be sold to generate funds for replacements.
“We are working with alternate vendors at the expense of the school district to help keep our electric buses functional and on the road,” explains Dr. Richard Decman, Superintendent of Herscher CUSD No. 2 district in Herscher, Illinois. “Currently, six of our 25 (Lion) electric buses need some type of repair.”
Student Transportation News reports that Lion buses represent fully half of Herscher’s overall fleet of 50 buses, and that the district has received nearly $10 million for the purchase of 25 electric buses and the related charging stations from various state and utility incentive programs.
Herscher isn’t the only district having problems with Lion buses. “All four Lion buses that we own are currently parked and not being used,” Coleen Souza, interim transportation director of Winthrop Public Schools, told Clean Trucking. “Two of them are in need of repairs which would cost us money which we are not willing to invest in because the buses do not run for more than a month before needing more repairs.”
More of the same in Maine, where Yarmouth School Department bought two Lion Electric buses in 2023 with the state covering the costs. According to Superintendent Andrew Dolloff, the buses almost never worked. “We’ve had some sporadic service over the past two years, but as soon as the tech leaves, the buses produce error codes again,” explained Dolloff. ” and “Then the technician quits or is released, and we wait a few months for the next response.”
Dolloff added that Yarmouth’s electric buses did not operate during the 2024-25 school year.
Lion’s new owners are seemingly uninterested in their customers’ plight – which might be easily dismissed if those new owners, Groupe MACH, weren’t also the old owners of Lion Electric.
That’s right, kids. Quebec-based real estate company Groupe MACH, which stepped in to “save” Lion Electric earlier this summer, along with Ontario-based Mirella & Lino Saputo Foundation, bought $90 million of equity in Lion Electric back in 2023. And, while the MACH people may not have been the ones who ultimately made the call about voiding the warranties (that decision was made by the Deloitte bankruptcy team), it is absolutely Group MACH who have, to date, not announced plans to continue to honor those warranties, either.
Make of that what you will.
Deloitte Lion letter
SOURCES: School Transportation News, Clean Trucking, Deloitte.
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The first-ever Liebherr MK 120-5.1E electric crane in customer hands has rolled into the narrow, historic streets of Bern’s old town at 20 meters tall with a 45 meter reach and (of course) zero emissions, no vibrations, and almost no noise.
Deployed by Swiss construction firm Zaugg AG Rohrbach, the new Liebherr electric mobile crane is working hard placing temporary roofs above operational construction sites. It’s precise work, since the narrow streets of Bern’s historic old town weren’t even built for cars — much less massive, five-axle construction machinery. The prices controls and smooth operation of the electric drive mean the MK120-5.1E’s operators could confidently navigate the narrow streets without causing damage and creating new, unpaid jobs for themselves.
“The all-wheel steering allows us to manoeuvre easily in the narrow alleyways,” explained Stefan Stettler, head of the crane department at Zaugg AG Rohrbach. In reverse gear, the crane worked its way along the historic Rathausgasse to its construction site, past the arcades typical of the old town.
In addition to on-board power, the mobile crane can also be plugged into on-site grid power where available, or any mobile power sources capable of offering a steady 63 AMP output for lifting work. A mobile Liebherr Liduro Power Port LPO 100 was on hand in Bern, made available to Zaugg expressly for this purpose. With the Liduro LPO 100 fully charged, Liebherr says the stored energy is good for two full days of crane work.
“The low-noise and emission-free crane work is naturally pleasant for (Bern’s) residents, tourists and passers-by,” explained Stettler. “Especially as we only extended the crane support on the side facing away from the construction site by 50 per cent, allowing pedestrians and cyclists to pass through at all times.”
The MK120-5.1E electric mobile crane offers 8,000 kg (~17,650 lbs.) of lifting capacity, and all of the crane’s drives and winches are powered by electric motors, eliminating both the need to “warm up” or service oil-based hydraulics. It can be had with either a 98 kWh on-board battery (shown) or a 544 hp Liebherr diesel genset.
Electrek’s Take
From compact wheel loaders to radical two-wheeled dumper concepts to massive battery electric retrofit excavators, Liebherr is absolutely killing it in the heavy equipment electrification race. Their electric equipment offerings are proving that EVs can get even the heaviest jobs done, and save big fleets even bigger money while doing it.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Liebherr, via Construction Equipment.
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