A task force comprising executives from Germany's leading carmakers has issued a 10-point agenda demanding urgent changes to European Union emissions regulations, along with lower energy prices, to safeguard the automotive industry. Delivered on Tuesday, the appeal puts the country's most powerful industrial voices squarely behind the push to rewrite emissions policy — and signals that regulation, not just technology, is now seen as a make-or-break question for the sector.
The demands land amid an intensifying debate over whether Brussels can meet the China challenge. As the wider European discussion makes plain, allowing industrial capacity to deteriorate without a coherent response could leave the continent increasingly dependent on foreign automotive technologies — and the decisive test for EU policy will be whether it enables European industry to compete rather than merely comply.
The industrial anxieties behind the agenda are concrete. Europe's push to localise battery production has run into uncomfortable truths: Porsche has begun scaling back production at its Cellforce battery division, and, as a recent Automotive News report highlighted, European companies are finding it simply too hard to decouple from the supply chains they currently depend on. The gap between regulatory ambition and industrial capacity is precisely what the task force wants Brussels to confront.
