the new system of EU fines on emissions penalizes precisely those who, by focusing on hybrids, are trying to get out of the quagmire in which they ended up due to the ideological and senseless rules of Brussels.
Brussels always manages to surprise us. And just when we thought that the perfect automotive harakiri had been accomplished, some numbers arrived, elaborated by a study of Dataforce taken from the newspaper Milan Financewhich demonstrate that there is never an end to the worst.
Remember the emissions fines? The ones that the main houses of the Old Continent have been complaining about for years? Those that Europe had decided to make more flexible to give a minimum demonstration of regret regarding the green disaster perpetrated against one of the central sectors for European industry? Well, in the end we arrived at a spread (for the years 2025-2027 the calculation of emissions was spread over the three-year period rather than year by year) which is not equivalent to a cancellation, on the contrary. So soon (early 2028) the issues will come home to roost.
Cars and emissions, the shock study on EU sanctions
And they will deliver another blow to the detriment of traditional automotive manufacturers, while resulting in yet another gift for the Chinese. According to the analysis of the specialized market research company, from January 2025 to April 2026, therefore the first period of the spreading, the EU automotive system would have accumulated 12.8 billion euros in debts and 9.7 billion in credits. A negative balance that exceeds 3 billion.
But the worst news is not this. The real problem is that producers who are trying to reverse the electric approach by converting to hybrid are penalized above all. The numbers say that Volkswagen it already has 2.3 billion in sanctions in its belly. Stellantis follows it with potential fines exceeding 1.2 billion euros and then there are Mercedes-Benz (just under 1 billion) and Nissan.
Better to stop. Because at this point we need to summarize some of the previous episodes to better understand the absurd fair set up by Brussels. First European strategists devised the Green deal imposing a conversion to electric with unrealistic timescales. Then when they realized that the market wasn’t holding up, that the world’s largest producers were going bankrupt and that they had given the entire sector and its supply chain to China which for years has held the semi-monopoly of green raw materials, they tried to patch things up. In color, of course.
The new fine system penalizes hybrids
Because the new fine system penalizes precisely those who, by focusing on hybrids, are trying to get out of the quagmire in which they ended up due to the ideological and senseless rules of Brussels.
For whose benefit? Not to mention the Chinese, who are in fact the real winners of the revised sanctions system. Apart Tesla which stands out from above with over 2 billion in credits accumulated between 2025 and the first part of 2026, all the other major beneficiaries are Asian. It couldn’t be missed Byd which exceeded 1.5 billion in assets, followed by Geely (1.4 billion), Leapmotor (over half a billion in assets with just 57,000 cars registered) and Xiaopeng (250 million). The fines will be paid by individual manufacturers, but Dataforce has also drawn up a ranking by country. The geographical distribution of fines. It turns out that Italy leads: at the end of April, in fact, we were in the negative by 3.8 billion euros, having reached an average level of CO2 emissions of 111.8 g/km (18.2 more than the expected average of 93.6). Then there is Germany with 2.8 billion in fines and an average emissions level of 101.7 g/km.
On the contrary, Northern European countries dominate the credit ranking, also because they have long been oriented towards electricity and have very different geographical characteristics and population density.
In short, everything is quite obvious, even the fact that European masochism knows no limits and that Brussels is persevering, as Dataforce highlights “in the transfer of billions of value from its car industry to that of non-European operators, in particular Tesla and the most advanced Chinese groups in electrification”.
