Leading the charge EU must not take its foot off pedal in EV race, say Swedish firms

As the battle lines harden amid Germany’s intensifying pressure on the European Commission to scrap the 2035 ban on the production of petrol cars, two Swedish car companies, Volvo and Polestar, are leading the campaign to persuade Brussels to stick to the date.

- Lisa O’Carroll

They argue that Germany’s opposition is a desperate attempt to paper over the cracks in its car industry, which will not only prolong the switch to electric vehicles but also hand the advantage to China.

“Pausing 2035 is just a bad, bad idea. I have no other words for that,” said German-born Michael Lohscheller, the chief executive of Polestar, Europe’s only all-electric car manufacturer. “If Europe doesn’t take the lead in this transformation, rest assured, other countries will do it for us.”

The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has called on the commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, to scrap the ban, asking her to permit the manufacture of hybrid and highly efficient combustion-engine cars beyond 2035 because consumers are still hesitant to buy EVs.

“We're sending the right signal to the commission with this letter,” Merz said, adding that Germany wanted to protect the climate in “a technology-neutral way”.

Sitting in Polestar’s glass-panelled offices in Gothenburg in Sweden, Lohscheller could not believe what was unfolding. His attempts to take part in the EU’s year-old “strategic dialogue” on the future of the car industry were snubbed. “I wrote twice, I’m not even sure we got an answer to the second letter,” he said.

Across the road, high above the giant Volvo assembly plant, Hakan Samuelsson, 74, the chief executive of Volvo Cars, likened the resistance to the ban mounted by the multibillion-euro car industry to the opposition to catalytic converters and seatbelts.

“If they were not mandatory, we would probably have 30% of our cars without seatbelts and if you consider the additional cost, we probably wouldn’t have any cars with catalytic converters either unless they were mandatory,” Samuelsson said.