EU environment ministers met this week and broke up still divided over the single most contested number in European climate policy: 2035, the year new petrol and diesel cars were supposed to disappear from showrooms. The deadline is no longer fixed. The argument now is how far to bend it.
The shift began in December 2025, when the European Commission proposed rewriting its own flagship rule. Instead of requiring all new cars to be zero-emission from 2035, the plan would set a 90% cut in tailpipe emissions. The remaining 10% could be covered with e-fuels, biofuels or low-carbon steel made inside the EU. In practice, that keeps plug-in hybrids, range extenders, mild hybrids and even conventional combustion engines alive well beyond the date that was meant to end them.
It is a significant retreat from a target that, only two years ago, the bloc treated as settled. The Commission frames the change as a move toward "technology neutrality" and a lifeline for an industry losing ground to Chinese electric-vehicle makers. Critics call it a climbdown dressed up as pragmatism.
The loudest voice for flexibility is Berlin. Chancellor Friedrich Merz and German carmakers backed the softer approach, arguing that a rigid 2035 cut-off would strand factories and jobs before the EV market is ready to absorb them. Germany builds more cars than any other member state, and its industry has spent the past year warning that the original timetable risked hollowing out Europe's most valuable manufacturing base while China races ahead.
For now, that argument has prevailed. The Commission's proposal hands the German industry much of what it asked for. But winning the proposal is not the same as winning the law, and the fight has now moved to the Council and the Parliament, where the rules must be agreed before they take effect.
A second bloc of governments thinks Brussels has not gone far enough. Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania have pushed for a longer delay, citing the cost of switching to electric vehicles, patchy charging networks and the risk to jobs in their own car-parts industries. Their concern is less about the principle than the pace: they want more time, and more help, before the combustion engine is written off.
Caught in the middle is Cyprus, which holds the Council presidency and the unenviable job of brokering a deal between capitals that want to slow the transition and those that want to protect it. The presidency has been steering negotiations since January, trying to turn a divided room into a single negotiating position.
Clean-transport researchers warn the softening comes at a price. Transport & Environment, the Brussels-based campaign group, argues that allowing e-fuels and hybrids to count toward the target weakens the incentive to go fully electric and hands carmakers an escape hatch from the investment the transition requires. The International Council on Clean Transportation, an independent research body, has cautioned that the loopholes built into the 90% figure could let real-world emissions run well above what the headline number implies.
The car fight does not stand alone. In March, EU governments agreed to give truck and bus makers more flexibility to meet their own CO2 targets — a sign that the appetite for strict deadlines is fading across the board as competitiveness fears collide with climate goals.
The 2035 ban was meant to be the clearest signal Europe had ever sent its industry: build electric, or do not build at all. Reopening it tells carmakers, investors and rival economies that the bloc's climate deadlines are negotiable when the economic pressure is high enough. That may buy Europe's automakers breathing room against Chinese competition. It also risks slowing the very transition the rule was designed to force, and leaves every future green target open to the same question — if 2035 can move, what cannot? The answer will be written not in this week's divided meeting, but in the months of bargaining between Berlin, the holdout capitals and a Cypriot presidency trying to hold the line somewhere in between.
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