Want a £13k electric car? EU must change the rules, say carmakers

European car makers are calling for a rewriting of the targets for electric-vehicle adoption and requesting incentives to help produce a new breed of affordable EV, with Stellantis boss Jean Phillipe Imparato declaring current targets are “not reachable” and “could crash the automotive industry in Europe”.

On 12 September, the manufacturers will go to the EU with a multi-pronged suggestion that Impararto said will give the industry achievable goals. 

The key one is a 15,000-Euro (£13,000) city car with a range of around 70 miles that would only be possible if the EU backed the relaxation of legislation around crash technology. Imparato claimed the cost of meeting these regulations is equal to the cost of manufacturing the car, which he suggested is around 1,500 Euros per car.  

“We propose to revamp and revolutionise the A-segment in Europe,” he told a small gathering of European journalists at the Munich motor show. “More than 20 per cent of the market is below 20,000 Euros – people don’t have the money to buy cars over 40,000 Euros.

“You would build this car in Europe, and have the specification homologated to get to 15,000 Euros.” he said. “Tons of customers would love to bring the A-segment back to their garage.” 

He pinpointed the demise of car makers’ ability to make money on small cars as a key part of the problem in hitting legislative EV sales targets. “We cannot push, our customers are not able to buy the cars,” he said.

Imparato also pointed to trends of the used market increasing in strength, plus drivers holding on to cars longer and extending finance contracts beyond their original length, as evidence of consumers feeling the pinch and not spending on more expensive cars.

Other key points in the four-pronged plan include a push to take the oldest cars off the road. Imparato said the European car parc is an average of 12 years old, with 150m cars over a decade old. He claimed swapping a 2010 car for a model up to three years old could save 76g/km on a car-versus-car basis, so suggested a target of getting 10 per cent of the oldest cars off the road every year. But rather than pushing for financial help to scrap older cars, Imparato suggested manufacturers get the environmental benefit towards their CO2 targets. “We don’t need money, we need the credit of CO2,” he said. 

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The boss of Stellantis, whose brands include Vauxhall, Peugeot, Citroen and Fiat, as well as the likes of Alfa Romeo, Jeep, DS and Abarth, encouraged politicians to look at a more targeted approach of supporting smaller B-segment EVs rather than all models, in order to help those least able to afford the transition to EV. He also called for a new clearer strategy on electric vans with an average EV target over a number of years. Electric vans, he said, account for around 10 per cent of the electric vehicles sold by Stellantis, which has almost a third of the European light commercial vehicle market.

“We need less discussions and more actions,” Imparato declared. “We would like to stop discussions and act now. The bottom line is that 2030 and 2035 targets in CO2 trajectory are not achievable. The market is not there, economical customers are not there, the charging infrastructure is not there, and the pricing is not there.”

Imparato concluded by saying that the action is necessary to protect manufacturers and suppliers for the long term, to ensure the transition to EV is able to progress. ”If we want to be CO2 neutral in the coming years, then do not give up on the battery industry,” he said. “If we create the conditions for them to go bankrupt, we will never be independent and CO2 neutral. It’s time to react – this doesn’t change the longer term, but addresses the three or four-year short term.

“We will invest and be compliant, but six or seven years ago we were betting on a 25-30 per cent market in 2025 and that’s not the case any more; the market is not at all at expectation. And we have to recognise that the market is not there - we see increasing divergence between the target and reality.”

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