For a minute there, it looked like Europe was ready to shove internal combustion into a glass display case, hang a plaque that said “Bad, Do Not Touch,” and call it climate policy. Now, after a lot of pressure from automakers, unions, and at least one very pointed letter from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the European Union is walking that back.
At least a bit.
Instead of an outright 2035 death sentence for combustion engines, Brussels is signaling a pivot: new ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles will likely still be allowed after 2035, but only if they run on low-emission renewable fuels like advanced biofuels and synthetic e-fuels.
On paper, that sounds like a technical nuance. In practice, it’s a pretty big deal. A hard ban would have forced every mainstream manufacturer into an all-EV corner, ready or not, in a market where charging infrastructure is still patchy, and price parity hasn’t fully landed. Industry and government projections have been warning for years that a too-fast, one-lane transition could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in engine development, manufacturing, and the enormous supply chain that hangs off combustion technology. Add in the reality that EVs currently make up under 20 percent of new car sales in the EU, while hybrids and plug-in hybrids still dominate the “transition tech” category, and you start to see why regulators are suddenly allergic to hard cutoffs.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m not neutral in this conversation. I love gas-powered machines for the way they feel, sound, and misbehave, and because they carry a century of design, culture, and memory inside their castings. I’m not arguing to keep coal plants alive or roll back basic climate science; I’m saying that sending every vintage car, classic motorcycle, and internal-combustion passion project into slow-motion extinction via policy always felt…lazy. There are smarter ways to reduce emissions than pretending the enthusiast and heritage world doesn’t exist.
The EU’s new stance, if it holds, is basically an admission of that.
The idea is that combustion can stick around, but it has to clean up its act by running on low-carbon fuels. Things like HVO100 (hydrotreated vegetable oil made from waste oils and animal fats) are already being used by BMW in some diesel applications, with claimed lifecycle CO₂ reductions of up to 90 percent versus regular diesel. Synthetic gasoline is another piece of the puzzle: Porsche’s eFuel plant in Chile has been producing small volumes of synthetic fuel using wind power, water, and captured CO₂, also framed as “virtually carbon-neutral” and theoretically capable of cutting emissions by a similar margin versus fossil gasoline.
Is that the magic fix? No. E-fuels and advanced biofuels are expensive, energy-intensive to make, and nowhere near the scale you’d need to replace fossil fuels for daily mass-market driving. Even the EU commissioner cheerleading this shift has acknowledged that building out the infrastructure for these fuels in less than a decade is a stretch.
But where they do make sense is exactly in the space I care about: legacy vehicles, performance machines, motorsport, and historic fleets that you’re never going to rebuild as EVs without stripping away what makes them special. A smaller pool of combustion engines running on much cleaner fuels is a far more interesting climate tool than just hoping everyone gives up and buys a crossover with a plug.
That said, the climate math doesn’t suddenly flip just because I like the way an inline-four sounds at redline. On a lifecycle basis (meaning manufacturing, operation, and end of life), battery electric vehicles sold in Europe today produce about 73% lower greenhouse gas emissions than comparable gasoline cars, thanks largely to a cleaner grid and improving efficiency.
Multiple independent life-cycle assessments show the same pattern: EVs generally have higher emissions up front because battery production is so resource and energy-intensive, but they more than make that back over time, especially in regions where electricity keeps decarbonizing. Batteries can account for roughly half or more of an EV’s production-phase emissions, depending on chemistry and supply chain, but by mid-century, those production emissions are expected to narrow as manufacturing itself gets cleaner.
The “is it greener to keep your old car” question is more nuanced. A few analyses have tried to answer it directly, and the general takeaway is this: if you’re replacing a relatively efficient, lightly driven vehicle, the benefit of swapping to an EV is smaller and takes longer to materialize. But if you’re driving a typical or thirsty ICE car regularly, a new EV tends to “break even” on its higher manufacturing footprint within a couple of years, then pulls ahead quickly as you rack up miles. So from a pure emissions standpoint, “drive it into the ground” is not always the smartest answer, although I fully understand the emotional and financial logic of keeping a well-maintained machine alive.
On the EV side, the uncomfortable part of the conversation is mining and waste. Battery production demands lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and other materials that come with real environmental and human costs if they’re extracted irresponsibly.
EVs shift emissions and damage away from tailpipes and into mines, refineries, and manufacturing plants; that’s not a reason to dismiss them, but it is a reason to take the full supply chain seriously. A European Parliament study and other recent research underline that while EVs win on lifetime emissions, their production stage is significantly dirtier than that of combustion cars, largely because of the battery.
The good news is that battery recycling and reuse actually move the needle. A recent study from Stanford found that recycling lithium-ion batteries can cut greenhouse gas emissions 58%–81% compared to making new battery materials, while also using far less water and energy. The International Energy Agency estimates that, with robust collection and recycling, a significant share of critical minerals could eventually be supplied from end-of-life batteries rather than new mining.
We’re not there yet; collection rates, recycling infrastructure, and regulation still lag behind EV sales. But the idea that EVs are just a one-way ticket to toxic battery mountains is lazy, and increasingly out of date. The system is messy and incomplete, but it’s not static.
Beyond batteries and biofuels, there's hydrogen, which many frame as the 'better' alternative. The reality is more complicated. On paper, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles running on green hydrogen (produced from renewable electricity and water) can have lifecycle emissions comparable to or slightly better than battery EVs. The ICCT estimates that hydrogen fuel cell cars using today’s fossil-based hydrogen cut emissions about 26% versus gasoline, and using fully renewable hydrogen can get you to around 79% lower emissions than gasoline, right in BEV territory.
The catch is everything else: producing truly green hydrogen is still expensive, storage and transport are technically fussy, infrastructure is almost nonexistent outside a few pilot markets, and most of the hydrogen produced today comes from fossil fuels and is anything but clean. Hydrogen absolutely has a role—likely in heavy transport, industry, and maybe some niche vehicle applications—but calling it a slam-dunk replacement for batteries or gasoline right now is wishful thinking.
So where does that leave us? For me, the EU’s decision to ease off an absolute combustion ban is less about “saving” gas engines and more about accepting reality: the transition is going to be messy, multi-track, and driven by technology that doesn’t exist at full scale yet. Giving space for low-carbon fuels, advanced combustion, EVs, hydrogen, and whatever else we invent in the next decade is just good risk management. It keeps skilled jobs and industrial know-how alive, it gives enthusiasts and legacy fleets a path that isn’t straight to the scrapyard, and it buys time to decarbonize the grid and build better systems around EVs instead of pretending they’re already perfect.
Personally, I hope this also cools down the ban-or-bust rhetoric for a while. I’d rather see regulators set tough but realistic emissions targets and let multiple technologies compete to meet them, instead of writing off whole categories of machines that mean a lot to people and, with the right fuels, don’t have to be climate villains. I’m still going to love gas bikes and vintage cars. I’m still going to argue that some engines deserve to live out their days being driven, not just dusted. But I’m also not blind to the numbers, and the numbers say we need EVs, cleaner fuels, and smarter policy all at once if we’re serious about climate.
In that sense, Europe not slamming the door on combustion outright feels less like a capitulation and more like an overdue course correction. The future still leans electric. It has to. But now there’s room in that future for some noise, some history, and, if we do this right, some genuinely cleaner fuel burning in genuinely meaningful machines.
