According to Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP), questions are still open in the dispute over the future of new cars with combustion engines in the EU. "Now the last legal questions still have to be clarified regarding the technical implementation of this proposal," he said on Friday in Mainz. The Ministry of Transport and the EU Commission are currently regularly sending each other letters with proposals and trying to find a solution to the current blockade.

Hendrik Kafsack

Economic correspondent in Brussels.

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Wissing had sent the European Commission a statement to the e-mail late Thursday evening. In it, he demands that Climate Protection Commissioner Frans Timmermans or the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen explain in detail in a letter signed by them how they will implement this declaration.

The e-mail sent by State Secretary Hartmut Höppner to Timmermans' office manager is available to the FAZ. The declaration provides for a multi-stage procedure with which Wissing wants to ensure that new cars with combustion engines actually powered by e-fuels can still be registered after 2035.

Multi-step procedure

As a first step, the Commission should propose a legal act that would create a new type of vehicle that runs exclusively on climate-neutral synthetic fuels and can still be registered after 2035. This would build on the existing EU rules on type approval. The Commission could adopt this quickly. She presented Wissing with a draft for this last Sunday. EU states and the European Parliament could probably slow this down at best.

However, this would not solve the problem that the new rules for CO2 emissions from cars, which Wissing has blocked so far, stipulate that new cars will no longer be allowed to emit CO2035 from 2. Combustion engines powered by synthetic fuels are climate-neutral because the CO2 emitted is removed from the air beforehand during the production of the fuels. But CO2 comes out of the exhaust.

As a second step, after the final adoption of the CO2 limits for cars, the Commission should therefore submit a so-called delegated act shortly before autumn 2023, which allows these vehicles to be credited without quantitative restrictions.

Unlike the legal act on type approval, however, this legal act could be overturned by the EU member states and the European Parliament. However, the threshold for this is higher than in a normal legislative procedure. Nevertheless, Wissing is also preparing for this case.

As a third step, the Commission should therefore propose a revision of the CO2 limits for cars, if the delegated act is blocked by the other EU states or the EU Parliament. However, this would then be a normal EU law, which would have to be adopted by the member states by qualified majority and the European Parliament by a simple majority. The Commission had reacted to this letter on Friday morning and sent its reply to the Federal Ministry of Transport.