EU Battery and Truck Rulings Collide With an Energy Bill 100 Billion Euros Higher

The letter is dated 1 October, 2026. Its signatories are members of the Climate Group's EV100 coalition, and they want the commission to keep the current heavy duty vehicle targets: a 43% cut in CO2 from 2019 levels by 2030, 64% by 2035 and 90% by 2040, as CleanTechnica reported on 1 October. Truck manufacturers have pushed for a loosening, and the fleet operators argue the opposite. Their case is financial, not environmental: EV100 members calculate that electric trucks will save enough on fuel to more than offset their higher purchase price.

Fuel is the whole argument. European diesel prices have climbed through 2026, and an energy shock is now the backdrop to almost every industrial policy decision in Brussels.

On the same day, Transport & Environment published analysis arguing that by 2030 there will be enough Made-in-EU cells to supply all EU-manufactured battery electric vehicles covered by the Industrial Accelerator Act, which covers corporate and private cars receiving public support, provided all projects materialise including medium-confidence ones. T&E says local content requirements for cells and cathode active materials could add 34% to EU battery demand versus the current baseline in 2027. The report also names the real bottleneck: cathode active materials and their precursors, where China controls up to 90% of global production capacity depending on chemistry, and as much as 95% for LFP.

Xavier Sol, director of sustainable investments and batteries at T&E, framed it as a jobs question. "European industrial competitiveness hinges on a simple question: will high value clean tech jobs come to Europe or remain in Asia?" he said in the analysis published on 30 September.

Two days earlier, the picture looked less comfortable. Tom's Hardware reported on 25 September that ASML, Europe's largest company by market capitalisation at around $660 billion, sold nothing in Europe in the first half of 2026. "We are selling absolutely nothing in Europe," Frank Heemskerk, the company's executive vice president of public affairs, said at an event at Amsterdam's De Balie. Europe accounted for 1% of ASML revenue in 2025, 5% in 2024, 4% in 2023 and 2% in 2022, according to the company's investor presentations. Heemskerk said there is simply no demand for the machines in Europe, and called on EU authorities to work on demand, not only supply-side subsidies.

Supply chains as a security file

Semiconductors keep surfacing in Europe's space and defence thinking too. At the Pretzl Connect 2026 press event, Kate Underhill, future space transportation propulsion architect at the European Space Agency, told EE Times that future launch systems and orbital infrastructure depend as much on onboard computing and connectivity as on propulsion. She said space systems typically operate "at least 10 years behind consumer electronics", citing ESA's SPARC-based LEON processors, developed since 1997. She also described ordering just 20 laser diodes from a German supplier that required a minimum order of 10,000 units, and noted that any U.S. component on a satellite pulls the whole spacecraft under U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

On 29 September, Orange Business was named trusted network partner for TESTA-EIRIS, the EU's private communications backbone, spanning at least 12 points of presence across five European regions with 99.999% availability, according to Light Reading. And on 30 September, Tech.eu reported that Paris-based Inbolt raised €11 million, bringing total funding to €30 million, for 3D vision and AI software already deployed on more than 200 robots in over 100 factories, with customers including Bosch, Ford, Stellantis and Toyota.

Capital is still moving. Headline closed a $400 million European fund on 1 October, focused on seed and Series A AI companies, and DIG Ventures closed a $120 million third fund the same day for AI-native enterprise and cloud infrastructure. Voltaback raised €2.8 million to scale EV charging reimbursement, Tech.eu reported, with the company citing a €600 annual loss for employees who charge at home unpaid and up to €2,000 a year in employer costs when they use public chargers instead.

The demand side is not the only pressure point. CleanTechnica reported on 30 September that T&E analysis finds the depreciation gap between combustion and electric cars in Germany, France, Italy and Spain falls from 12.9 percentage points to 2.6 once subsidies, acquisition taxes, inflation and fleet composition are accounted for, an 80% reduction. That matters for leasing and financing pricing, which in turn shapes fleet decisions.

Whether any of it survives the energy bill is a separate question. The dossier does not resolve how much of the current price pressure is permanent, and the truck letter and the battery analysis both rest on the assumption that policy stays stable long enough to pay back.