Europe's Truck Lobby Wants the Rules Frozen. Its Biggest Customers Want the Opposite.

Introduction

On the same morning, two groups of European companies sent letters to the president of the European Commission, and they asked for opposite things. One group was a coalition of the continent's largest truck and bus manufacturers, represented at the IAA Transportation show in Hannover. The other was a set of their biggest customers — the logistics operators, retailers and utilities that actually buy the trucks — assembled under the Climate Group's EV100 banner. Transport & Environment's version of the letter and the fleet operators' response make the split plain.

The manufacturers want the deadline moved. The fleets want it held. Between those two positions sits a policy that is failing in a very specific, very measurable way, and the argument is no longer really about whether Europe should electrify its freight. It is about who pays for the gap between the regulation and the grid.

The Numbers That Started the Argument

The regulatory backdrop is unforgiving. Under the European Union's CO2 standards for heavy-duty vehicles, new trucks must cut emissions 43 percent below 2019 levels by 2030, 64 percent by 2035, and 90 percent by 2040. Those are fleet-wide manufacturer obligations, enforced through penalties rather than through direct regulation of individual vehicles.

Against that, the actual state of the market is stark. Electric trucks accounted for about 2 percent of heavy-duty vehicle registrations in Europe last year, edging up to roughly 2.2 percent in the first half of this year. The regional spread is even wider: Germany leads at approximately 4.3 percent, France sits at about 2.4 percent, and in major truck markets such as Poland, Spain and Italy the share is under 1 percent.

Seven of the manufacturers' chief executives — from DAF Trucks, Daimler Truck, Ford Otosan, Iveco Group, MAN Truck & Bus, Scania Group and Volvo Group, a grouping that accounts for about 97 percent of the European commercial vehicle market — stood on the same stage at Hannover to make their case. Karin Rådström, who chairs the ACEA Commercial Vehicle Board as well as leading Daimler Truck Holding, framed the stakes in financial terms. Under the current framework, the penalty works out to roughly €120 million for every percentage point of shortfall. A manufacturer that lands 10 points below target faces a bill on the order of €1.2 billion, which she noted is roughly what Mercedes-Benz Trucks earned worldwide in 2025.

The Infrastructure Gap, Measured

The manufacturers' argument is not that electric trucks are unready. It is that the surrounding system is. They point out that more than 60 zero-emission truck models and over 25 zero-emission bus models are already on sale, which makes the missing units a question of enabling conditions rather than of engineering.

The most concrete number in the debate concerns grid connections. Securing a connection for a truck charging site in Europe can take up to seven years. That single figure explains a great deal about the current 2 percent market share.

The Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation is supposed to solve this. It requires member states to install 500 truck-suitable charging points every month in order to hit a 2030 goal of 20,000 dedicated charge points. Instead, Europe has installed fewer than 2,000 such points in total since the regulation was agreed in 2023 — roughly 50 a month against a required 500. The required pace is ten times the actual pace.

This is not a rounding error. It is a tenfold gap in the rate of infrastructure deployment needed to make the 2030 target arithmetically reachable, and it is the single most important fact in the entire dispute. Owners of electric heavy-duty vehicles are not choosing diesel because they distrust the technology. They are choosing it because the depot three years from now cannot be guaranteed a supply of electricity.

The Two Constituencies

Read the two letters together and the shape of the conflict becomes clear.

The manufacturers say the enabling conditions are delayed. They cite slow grid connections, the need to adjust weight and dimension rules to address the payload disadvantage of zero-emission trucks, and a resistance to carbon-dioxide-based road tolling. Their requested remedy is a three-year delay to the 2030 compliance timeline, to 2033, so that penalties do not land on them before the ecosystem catches up.

The fleets say the opposite. EDF, IKEA, Geopost and DFDS, all EV100 members, wrote to Ursula von der Leyen on 1 October urging the Commission to keep the existing standards intact. Their reasoning is commercial rather than environmental. Marion Labatut of EDF put it plainly: businesses are already electrifying their heavy-duty fleets, and stable, ambitious CO2 standards are what let them keep investing at scale. The message from the coalition, in the words of Dominic Phinn, head of transportation at the Climate Group, is that companies need certainty rather than a weakening of the rules that underpin investment decisions.

There is a second-order calculation underneath the fleets' position, and it favours electrification. Against the higher purchase price of a battery-electric truck, EV100 members have run the numbers and found that fuel savings more than offset the capital premium. One executive summarised the mood of the customer side as: set the rules, stick to them, and then get out of the way. Do not ask us to change horses midstream.

Neither side is acting in bad faith. That is precisely what makes this hard. The customers are not buying delays; they are buying certainty, and the manufacturers are not asking for relief from climate obligations; they are asking for time in which the grid can catch up with the law. Both positions are rational, and both cannot be satisfied at once.

The Carrot the Fleets Want

If the fleets want the standards held, they have to be prepared to fund the network that makes holding them possible. That is the question neither letter fully answers, and it is where a delay to the 2030 target would likely be decided in practice.

A workable compromise may already exist in a policy tool the manufacturers themselves mentioned: carbon-dioxide-based road tolling, which charges operators a distance-based fee scaled to their emissions. It directly addresses the cost-parity gap without weakening the standard, and it rewards the operator who switches rather than penalising the manufacturer who builds. The catch is adoption. Only 13 of the 27 member states have implemented such tolling at all, and fewer than those meaningfully differentiate between diesel and electric vehicles.

The fleets are effectively proposing that they fund the gap. The manufacturers are effectively proposing that the timetable absorb it. Both are arguing, in effect, that the other should carry the cost of a grid build-out that neither side controls.

There is one more constraint that neither letter can resolve on its own, and it affects the operators more than the OEMs. Heavy battery packs can cost a truck one to four tonnes of legal payload. That loss cannot be renegotiated in a procurement meeting; it is a hard regulatory ceiling. It is why heavy liquid and bulk transport, which routinely operates at legal weight limits, have been effectively excluded from the electric transition. Until weight and dimension rules are adjusted, some freight simply cannot be electrified at any price, and no letter to Brussels changes that.

Conclusion

The European truck transition has reached the point where the argument is no longer about the vehicles. Sixty-plus zero-emission models are available. The products exist. What does not exist is the grid: fewer than 2,000 dedicated truck charging points against a 2030 target of 20,000, at an installation rate of fifty a month where the regulation demands five hundred, with connection queues measured in years.

That single mismatch is what manufacturers are really complaining about when they ask for the 2030 deadline to move to 2033, and it is what their largest customers are really refusing to accept when they ask the Commission to leave the standards alone. One side wants the law to match reality. The other wants reality to catch up to the law, and is offering to help pay for it through the fleets.

Watch the AFIR and Grids Package revisions rather than the 2027 review of the CO2 standards themselves. That is where the fleets are betting the transition will be won or lost — not with a change in the headline target, but in whether Europe installs five hundred truck charging points in a month instead of fifty. The technology debate is over. The grid queue is not.

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References

• European Businesses in the Transport Sector Call for EU to Maintain Stability & Ambition on Decarbonising Heavy-Duty Vehicles — CleanTechnica
• European Fleet Operators Urge EU Commission Not To Weaken Truck Emissions Policy — CleanTechnica
• Seven European CV OEMs Unite, Call for 2030 CO2 Target to Be Delayed to 2033 — EV Tech News
• EU 2030 CO2 truck targets: ACEA OEMs demand three-year delay — Motor Transport
• Truck makers demand three-year CO2 delay — Commercial Motor