Europe's truck makers want softer CO2 rules. Fleet operators say no

The letter, dated 1 October 2026, comes from members of the Climate Group's EV100 coalition. CleanTechnica reported the companies include IKEA, the French utility EDF, Geopost (owned by France's postal service) and Copenhagen-based DFDS.

Their argument is commercial, not environmental: they have already ordered electric trucks and want the rules to stay fixed. Current EU rules require a 43 percent cut in CO2 from 2019 levels by 2030, 64 percent by 2035 and 90 percent by 2040. Those targets are impossible without a much larger fleet of electric medium and heavy duty trucks, and the signatories say weakening them would strand investments they have already made. "Set the rules, stick to them, and then get out of the way," is how CleanTechnica summarised the letter's message. Marion Labatut of EDF said in a statement that "businesses are already taking action to electrify their heavy duty fleets" and that "maintaining ambitious and stable CO2 standards will give companies the confidence to continue investing at scale."

The timing matters. The same week, Transport & Environment published analysis arguing Europe will have enough battery cells to meet demand from corporate and private EVs covered by the Industrial Accelerator Act by 2030, provided all announced projects materialise. T&E also warned that China controls up to 90 percent of global cathode active material capacity, and as much as 95 percent for LFP chemistry. The bottleneck is midstream, not cells.

Charging is the binding constraint

The EV100 letter names charging infrastructure for heavy duty vehicles as its main concern. That gap is being attacked from several directions. On 1 October, French fleet software startup Voltaback raised 2.8 million euros from Serena and business angels including Electra co-founder Aurélien de Meaux, according to Tech.eu. Voltaback calculates home charging reimbursement for company EVs using data from electricity bills, meters and connected vehicles, a method it says is patented and validated by Bureau Veritas.

The numbers behind that pitch are stark. Tech.eu reported that employees who are not reimbursed for home charging lose 600 euros a year, while the same charges cost their employer up to 2,000 euros a year. In the first half of 2026, 241,565 new electric cars were registered in France, 28.2 percent of the passenger car market.

Money is moving at the top of the stack too. Headline closed a 400 million dollar European fund on 1 October to back Seed and Series A companies, with AI as the focus, Tech.eu reported. DIG Ventures closed its third fund at 120 million dollars the same day, targeting AI-native enterprise and cloud infrastructure across roughly 30 pre-seed and seed deals.

Public infrastructure keeps expanding

On the public side, Orange Business was selected as network partner for TESTA-EIRIS, the EU's private backbone for public administrations, Light Reading reported on 29 September. The design covers at least 12 points of presence across five European regions and claims 99.999 percent availability. It is not a charging network, but it is the kind of sovereign infrastructure argument that the EV100 letter leans on.

Europe's space industry is making a parallel case. At the Pretzl Connect 2026 event in Budapest, ESA's Kate Underhill told EE Times that launch systems now depend as much on onboard computing and connectivity as on propulsion, and that the sector remains exposed to semiconductor and raw material supply chains. She said space systems typically run "at least 10 years behind consumer electronics."

Not every development this week points the same way. A genomic study published in Nature and covered by ScienceDaily on 30 September traced bats back to Europe around 65 to 60 million years ago, based on 103 bat genomes and 44 fossils. The relevance to freight is zero. The methodological point is not: large-scale sequencing worked because researchers pooled data across 64 countries, which is roughly what the truck standards debate is about.

One caution. The truck makers' counter-argument does not appear in the dossier, so it cannot be weighed here. What is on the record is a letter from buyers asking Brussels not to move the target. For fleet operators who have already bought electric trucks, the regulatory signal is the asset.