Mobility: Europe must move from targets to the conditions for delivering them

Por Gaël Quéinnec, managing director, Movin’On — China – POLITICO

In 2025, 28 percent of new heavy-duty vehicles sold in China were electric. In the European Union, the figure was 1.9 percent, according to data from the International Council on Clean Transport (ICCT). That is a ratio of almost one to 15, despite the technology now being available on both sides.

This gap is no longer technological. It reveals a deeper problem: we have set trajectories without creating the economic and political conditions needed to achieve them. China has the planning and implementation capacity to bypass the patient process of building coalitions among stakeholders. Europe, by contrast, is liberal and democratic: it can neither impose the transition by decree nor should it try to. It must make the transition possible by aligning interests, rules and risks. Who should bear the risk of scaling up: the manufacturer, carrier, energy provider or financier? Who invests first? Who guarantees demand?

The direction is clear: sustainable, sovereign, desirable and viable mobility. But the coming months will involve a series of critical decisions, and Europe must turn its ambitions into conditions for action: it must move from a policy based on targets to one based on creating the conditions to achieve them. When the path is not credible, the destination itself eventually comes into question. Our choices matter. So do our failures to choose. Three examples illustrate this.

First example: heavy-duty vehicles. Seventy-eight percent of European land freight travels by road: almost everything on our shelves has traveled by truck. The technology needed to electrify these flows is available, as is the regulatory framework; the challenge is economic. Higher purchase prices, uncertain residual values, charging infrastructure that still needs to be deployed, slow electricity-grid connections and hesitation over a technology that is advancing rapidly: no single stakeholder can bear these risks alone.

The answer lies in distributing those risks more effectively, and even transforming risks for some into opportunities for others. Battery leasing, residual-value guarantees, shared charging infrastructure and securing volumes through contracts: the ecosystem already has some of the solutions it needs.

Public action becomes decisive where the market cannot act alone or cannot act quickly enough, particularly on electricity-grid connections and interoperability. It must also provide confidence in the direction of travel: not by imposing constraints across the board, but by making the trajectory credible, facilitating the initial stages of voluntary transformation and supporting those willing to take the first risks.

These are the actors who should be supported, before others are allowed to enter a market that has become clear and attractive. Europe must not reconsider its destination every time implementation becomes difficult, because nothing discourages investment more than regulatory instability. Instead, it must create the conditions needed to reach that destination.

Otherwise, uncertainty about scaling up the transition will fuel opposition to the direction itself. The choice is simple: distribute risk to create the market or remain trapped in diesel for too long.

Second example: the affordable small car. Europe has produced icons such as the 2CV, the Fiat 500 and the Beetle. Then our cars grew larger: some models now weigh twice as much as their predecessors with the same name, and their prices have followed the same upward trajectory.

Today, European electric cars remain out of reach for a large proportion of households. We began with premium models and subsidized SUVs, hoping that costs would eventually fall. Meanwhile, a wave of affordable Asian electric small cars, produced at scale, is preparing to occupy the space that we are choosing, by default, to leave open.

The European Commission has addressed the issue directly by proposing a dedicated category for compact electric vehicles, with incentives for those produced in Europe. This is a step forward. We believe more needs to be done, because industrial sovereignty, purchasing power and the environment all come together here.

That is the ambition behind the Pop Car project, which we are developing with a coalition of industry leaders and experts; a car with the right dimensions in terms of weight, battery and total cost of ownership. It is efficient and affordable, without compromising on safety or desirability.

Here too, the objective should not be to force everyone to switch at the same pace. It should be to secure a European product that can initiate the market and allow adoption to expand once price, usability and confidence come together.

The question is this: what electric car will a European household be able to afford tomorrow and where will it be produced? The choice is whether to make the entry-level segment strategic again or allow it to develop elsewhere.

Third example: artificial intelligence (AI). AI is orchestrating a growing share of our mobility systems. It directs the routes of millions of vehicles, manages entire flows of traffic and allocates scarce resources: time, public space, freight capacity and energy.

Since Aug. 2, 2026, the AI Act has imposed its first transparency obligations on certain systems. This is necessary, but it does not tell us what AI should optimize.

AI executes instructions. It does not decide on its own what matters. Should it prioritize speed, efficiency or environmental performance? The operator’s costs or accessibility for everyone? These priorities do not establish themselves automatically: they are collective choices, written into software, and they shape our mobility systems just as much as physical infrastructure does.

Our conviction is that every AI system deployed in mobility should demonstrate its net benefits (in terms of carbon emissions, user costs and accessibility) rather than focusing solely on time saved.

Here too, regulators have a decisive role to play: setting the collective compass without suffocating innovation, giving pioneers confidence and then facilitating the spread of useful solutions. The choice is whether to write the instructions collectively or submit to opaque rules written by others on our behalf.

Three examples, one common thread. A transition succeeds when those responsible for making it a reality have both the incentive and the capacity to do so.

Families, carriers, operators and manufacturers all weigh similar considerations when faced with prices, financing and investment. But they also share the feeling that our economic model is exhausting the planet.

Europe’s challenge is to reinvent that model by voluntarily aligning interests rather than through excessive state direction. In a democracy, public authorities set the destination; they cannot make the journey possible on their own. Everyone must also be given the means, motivation and confidence needed to embark on it freely.

Putting constraints on the table, turning disagreements into a source of progress and building common trajectories: this is what we do at Movin’On, and what we will bring to Paris on Oct. 8 and 9 at our summit.

Europe has spent a long time debating the destination. It must now organize the journey. This requires public authorities to remain firm on the overall direction, useful in launching the transition, attentive to pioneers and then confident in the ability of other stakeholders to follow once the conditions are in place.

The time has come to make choices.

Gaël Quéinnec
Managing director, Movin’On

Sources

• 28 percent of new heavy-duty vehicles sold in China were electric in 2025 — ICCT, Global Market Monitor, August 2026: https://theicct.org/publication/global-market-monitor-trucks-buses-2025-aug26/
• 1.9 percent of EU-27 heavy-duty vehicles were zero-emission in 2025 — ICCT, European market monitoring, March 2026: https://theicct.org/publication/r2z-eu-hdv-market-development-quarterly-jan-dec-2025-mar26/
• Road freight accounts for 78 percent of EU land freight, measured in tonne-kilometres and excluding maritime transport — Eurostat: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Freight_transport_statistics_-_modal_split
• SUVs accounted for 51 percent of new-car sales in the EU as early as 2023 — ACEA: https://www.acea.auto/figure/new-passenger-cars-by-segment-in-eu/
• AI Act Article 50 applicable from August 2, 2026 — European Commission guidelines of July 20, 2026: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/guidelines-transparency-obligations-providers-and-deployers-ai-systems

Disclaimer

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Fonte: China – POLITICO